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CopyrightN? 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE RECITER'S LIBRAET. DEOEMBEE, 1901. 



No. 12. 




it, 1901, by Edgar S, Werner Publishing & Supply Co. Entered at N. Y. Post-Office as second-class mail matter, 
i Incorporated) 



PRICE, 35 CENTS. 



Harmonic 



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uymnastics and 
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Edited by MARION LOWELL. 



The most elaborate series of exercises ever published for training 
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Tolstoi: 

<A Critical Study of Him and His Works. 

<By THOMAS SELTZER. ^. 

Copyright, 1901, by Edgar S. Werner Publishing & Supply Co. (Incorporated). 
THE RUSSIAN NATION: 

The Russian population is a heterogeneous mass composed of up- 
ward or a hundred nationalities speaking more than forty languages. 
The predominating element, however, is Slavic which constitutes 
about three-quarters of the entire population ; but besides the Slavs, 
who are a branch of the great Aryan family, the other two ethno- 
logical divisions are also largely represented — the Turanian by the 
Mongolians and the Finns, and the Semitic by the Jews. The Slavic 
population embraces the Russians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, and a- 
number of smaller races. The Russians proper, who form about 
two-thirds of the whole number of inhabitants, are again subdivided 
into Great Russians occupying the northern and central part of the 
country ; the Little Russians inhabiting the Ukraine which comprises 
the governments of Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava and Kharkov ; and the 
White Russians who have their homes in Vitebsk and Moghilev. 
In addition there remains to be mentioned, the German quota of the 
Russian population, located in the Baltic provinces and Southern 
Russia. 

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE: 

Although many languages and dialects are spoken throughout the 
empire, the literary language of Russia, which is that of the pre- 
dominating Great Russians, is one. It is the chief unifying factor 
of the compound of the Russian population and the vehicle of inter- 
communication among its various constituent elements. It is also 
the official language and hence the language of the schools. 

Russian first became a written language in the time of Peter the 
Great, till which period the old Slavic — the language of the church 
—had been the only medium of literary expression, and had, in con- 



""< S" 



'- 1 

2 TOLSTOI: S^ ~ 

sequence, exercised an important influence on the Russian popular 
speech, as on that of other Slavic dialects. The Mongol conquest, 
and the preponderance of Polish elements in the western parts of 
the empire, have also introduced into the Russian language a great 
number of Mongolian and Polish expressions; in addition to which, 
the efforts of Peter the Great to give his subjects the benefits of 
western culture have enlarged the Russian vocabulary, especially in 
arts and industry, with numerous German, French and Dutch words. 
The chief characteristics of Russian as a language are simplicity 
and naturalness. The grammatical connection of sentences is slight, 
and the number of conjunctions scanty. Perspicuity and expres- 
siveness are obtained by the freedom allowed in the placing of words. 
Auxiliary verbs and articles there are none ; while personal pronouns 
may or may not be used along with verbs. The vocabulary of Rus- 
sian is very rich, foreign words being, so to speak, Russianized. 
The capabilityof the language for forming compounds and deriva- 
tives is so great, that from a single root not less than 2,000 words 
are sometimes derived. The purest and most grammatical Russian 
is spoken in the center, about Moscow. 

RUSSIAN LITERATURE : 

Russia has but lately entered the arena of civilization and dis- 
plays many characteristics of what may be termed a national par- 
venu. Leaving out of consideration the symptoms displayed in the 
internal national events of the country and in its social life, and turn- 
ing a rapid glance at its prominent men of letters, we notice that in 
the majority and most typical cases, there is manifested a certain 
feverish restlessness, a want of practical balance. It is as though 
they desired to make up for loss of ground. The ideas and ideals 
which the western nations had taken centuries to develop are rapidly 
absorbed to some extent, but ill-digested and soon outgrown and 
rejected. Dissatisfaction sets in. They wander forth in quest of 
new philosophies, new ideals and often land in the reaction of mys- 
ticism, despair, pessimism, and even indifference. 

Russian literature, like all the great literatures of Europe, began 
with popular poetry. This poetry is based partly on myths, the 
kernel of which is traceable to the primitive Aryan mythology, and 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 3 

partly deals with the subjects of marriage, love, death, feasts and 
various other social customs. The oldest literature includes also 
a number of popular tales in prose. 

The epic poems called bylini are among the most important of 
this early poetry. They are divided into cycles, most of them cen- 
tering about the mythical national hero, Ilia Muromets. Others 
have reference to legends or historical events as recent even as the 
early part of the last century. These bylini have been communicated 
orally by successive generations of popular singers and have been 
subjected to some changes of detail in their contact with fresh events 
and new conditions, but have, in the main, preserved their ancient 
character, which must have become well fixed at some distant period 
in the past. 

The first chronicle extant, the " Chronicle of Nestor," dates from 
the latter part of the eleventh century. This was followed by a 
number of other chronicles, by works on the lives of the saints, and 
by the famous " Tale of the Troop of Igor," a prose epic originating 
probably in the twelfth century. 

The two and a half centuries of the disastrous Tartar domination 
that followed, was a period of national stagnation, during which 
Russian literature almost disappeared. It gradually revived with 
the overthrow of the foreign yoke, but up to the reign of Peter, 
remained devoid of any remarkable achievements. The culture it 
spread, however, prepared the way for the reception of the more 
advanced civilization of the West when Peter extended it his wel- 
come. In 1564, the first printing-press was established in Moscow, 
and the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul were printed. 
Polish attempts to convert the Russians to Roman Catholicism, and 
especially the zeal of the Jesuits, led to the foundation of Russian 
schools, where the Russian language was taught and such other 
studies promoted as would enable the defenders of the Greek church 
effectually to meet their opponents in religious controversy. 

Peter the Great found it helpful for his reforms to advance the 
clause of literature, and he himself occasionally contributed to the 
St. Petersburg Gazette, the first Russian newspaper, founded under 
his auspices, in 1703. With his reign begins a new era for Russia. 
Under him flourished the first Russian authors whose incipient at- 



4 TOLSTOI: 

tempts developed in organic continuity into the imposing structure 
of the Russian literature of to-day. 

Prince Antiokh Kantemir (1708-44) wrote satires in the style of 
Boileau, which were translated into French. Vasili Tatishchev 
(1685-1750) was the author of the first history of Russia. With 
Trediakovski (1703-69), a voluminous translator, began that activity 
in the rendering of foreign classics to which almost every great 
Russian author since then has contributed his quota ; so that now 
Russian literature stands unequaled for the quality of its reproduc- 
tions of the literary treasures of every land. The most important 
figure of that period, however, is Lomonosov (171 1-65). He wrote 
a Russian grammar, laid down literary laws which he also taught by 
example in his own diverse writings, and introduced a new system 
of versification more suitable to the genius of the language. 

The period that followed, although devoid of any original pro- 
ductions — French influence and taste then holding sway in Russia 
as throughout the rest of Europe — is nevertheless not without im- 
portance. Under Catherine II. (1762-96), who was a patron of art 
and literature, flourished Kniazhnin (1742-91), author of a number 
of cumbrous tragedies written in Alexandrine verse ; several other 
tragedians of the same type; von Vizin (1744-92) whose comedies, 
" Nedorosl " (" The Minor ") and " Brigadier," possess real literary 
excellence ; and Kniazhnin and Kapnist who wrote comedies with 
almost equal success. Catharine II. herself tried her hand at a 
number of light plays which are said to be not bad. Khemnitzer 
and Dmitriev were the two prominent fabulists of the time, while 
Bogdanovich (1743-1803) distinguished himself by his poem " Du- 
shenka." But the greatest lyric poet was Derzhavin (1743-1816) 
who ranks with the great European writers of the age. He is best 
known by his stately odes of which the " Ode to God " was translated 
into many languages, even including Chinese and Japanese. Of the 
prose writers, the best are Novikov (1744-1818) and Radishchchev 
(1749-1802), who published the "Journey from St. Petersburg to 
Moscow." 

The last years of Catherine's reign were marked by a reaction 
against everything liberal, and the literature of the country suffered 
a depression from which it began to recover only after the fall of 






A CRITICAL STUDY. 5 

Napoleon. Karamzin (1766- 1826) was the most eminent literary 
figure of the time. He reformed the literary style, clearing it of its 
ancient forms, heavy modes of expression and foreign interpola- 
tions. He also offered models for others to follow by his numerous 
and various productions. His most famous works are his " History 
of Russia," " Letters of a Traveler " and the sentimental novel, 
" Bednaia Louisa " (" Poor Louisa "). The Vestnik Evropy (Mes- 
senger of Europe) founded by him is still one of the best magazines 
of the country. To the same period belongs the dramatist Ozerov, 
whose tragedies, though on the whole following the classical models, 
already bear evidence of the incoming romantic spirit. 

With the works of Zhukovski (1783-1852), and his translations 
of some of the poems of Schiller, Wieland and Byron, began the 
romantic movement which entered Russia at about the same time as 
the other countries of Europe. Alexander Pushkin (1799- 1838), 
called the Father of Russian poetry, became the foremost exponent 
of the new school. He early came under the influence of Byron 
and all that it stood for — life-weariness, satiety and hatred of all 
conventional restraint. These Byronic elements are the constantly 
recurring notes in his lyric poems of that period and particularly in 
the four epic compositions : " The Prisoner of the Caucasus " 
(1821) ; " The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" (1822) ; " The Brother- 
Robbers" (1822); and "The Gipsies" (1824), of which the first 
mentioned poem strongly recalls Byron's " Childe Harold." He 
later succeeded in throwing off the shackles of Byronism and ap- 
proached more and more the methods of Shakespeare and Goethe. 
" Evgeni Oniegin," the most widely read of Pushkin's poems, is a 
novel in verse, written between the years 1823 and 1831. It falls 
therefore distinctly under the influence of Byron, especially of his 
" Childe Harold " and " Don Juan " ; Oniegin is a hero quite after 
the heart of Byron. Among the other works of Pushkin are " Boris 
Godunov " (1831), a drama; "Poltava" (1828), an epic; and a 
number of prose tales. Until the advent of the realistic school Push- 
kin has been considered the greatest Russian poet. His style, both 
in prose and poetry, approaches perfection and his verse is distin- 
guished by its easy, graceful and rapid fluency. Among the other 
writers of the period are Griboiedov, who produced a comedy of the 



6 TOLSTOI: 

very first rank in " Gore ot Uma " (" Trouble from Cleverness ") ; 
the poets Ryleev and Odoievski ; the critic and story writer, Bestuz- 
hev ; and the poets Delvig, Iazykov and Gnedich. 

The greatest follower of, and the greatest poet next to, Pushkin 
is Lermontov (1814-1841). His works are steeped in the mockery, 
the sneers and the abandonment of Byronism, but he wrote more 
subjectively than Pushkin. Lermontov was truly a Byronic spirit. 
He was sincere in his contempt of the world's ways and his revolt 
was real. Hence he rarely strikes a false note. His best works are 
his short lyrics, " Mtziri " (" The Novice "), " The Demon " " Iz- 
mael Vey," " Valerin," and his prose tale " Geroi Nashego Vremeni " 
("A Hero of Our Times"). 

The most energetically polemic writer of the romantic school was 
N. Polevoi (1796-1846), and its great critic was Belinski (1810-48), 
sometimes called the Russian Lessing. At the same time flourished 
the world-renowned fable writer Krylov (1768- 1844), and the peas- 
ant poet Koltzov (1809-42), who, although a contemporary of, had 
no affiliation with, the romantic movement. 

With the works of the first great Russian novelist begins the 
realistic literature of Russia. This will appear only natural when 
it is remembered that sentimentalism or feigned emotion is utterly 
foreign to the Russian nature. Hence a master spirit like Gogol's 
could not but discover the incongruity of laying the foundation of a 
national literature on elements borrowed from peoples whose history, 
traditions and environment differed so widely from the Russian and 
produced racial characteristics at variance with, and often directly 
opposed to, those of the Russian Slavs. 

The literature of this last period is so rich in great names that 
it will be possible to enumerate only the most prominent among them. 
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) has produced masterpieces of the highest 
order in his comedy " The Revisor ", in some of his shorter stories, 
as " Taras Bulba ", and in the long novel, " Mertvyia Dushi " 
("Dead Souls"). He was followed by Turgenev (1818-1883), 
Dostoievski (1822- 1887) and Leo Tolstoi, each great in his own and 
original manner, but the last towering high above them not only by 
his art but by his life. Goncharov, author of " Oblomov," Garshin. 
Potapenko, Chekhov and the genial dreamy Korolenko are among 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 7 

the minor fiction writers; while the youthful Gorki is fast acquiring 
international celebrity and taking rank with the most illustrious 
names of modern literature. 

Of the poets of the period, the greatest is Nekrasov (1822-77), 
whose works are a plea for the poor and oppressed. He was followed 
by Polonski, Nikitin, Nadson, Konstantin Konstantinovich and a 
host of others. Aleksei Tolstoi produced an excellent trilogy on 
the " Death of Ivan the Terrible," and Ostrovski is the chief and 
most prolific author of the popular drama. Pisarev is the great critic 
of the realistic school ; Soltykov as a satirist is equaled by few writers 
of the nineteenth century ; while Hertzen and Chernyshevski, authors 
respectively of the novels " Kto Vinovat? " (" Whose Fault? ") and 
" Shto Delat? " (" What is to be Done? "), have struck deep root 
in the liberal thought of Russia by the spread of their nihilistic 
teachings. 

TOLSTOI'S RANK AND PLACE : 

Tolstoi stands out as the most gigantic personality in the world's 
literature of the age. He has been compared to a mighty oak tower- 
ing high and solitary above his fellows in the field of literature. 
He is the greatest of contemporary novelists; Europe does not con- 
tain his equal. There is no other modern novelist (except Dostoiev- 
ski) who like Tolstoi reveals to us the secret channels of human 
thought and feeling, the most hidden mainsprings of human action ; 
who like him represents the individual and social life-process in all 
its phases ; who is equally at home in all the spheres of modern life 
(which can not be said of Dostoevski) ; who never seeks for an 
ideal or heroic motive unless it offers of itself, whether he takes as 
his subject the misery of everyday life or some significant moment 
in social or political history. The best testimony for Tolstoi is that 
his works are not printed books but life itself. Yet this great author, 
the greatest interpreter of nineteenth century life, is nevertheless 
essentially a Russian. His works deal almost exclusively with Russia 
and the Russians, and when foreigners are even indirectly engaged 
in them, he evinces a national prejudice, as witness the treatment of 
Napoleon in " War and Peace." His Russian figures are moreover 
characteristically Russian, with all the traits and peculiarities inci- 



8 TOLSTOI: 

dental to special environment. That they none the less appeal im- 
mediately to the whole world, is due to the completeness and thor- 
oughness with which he draws his characters in every relation to life, 
thus bringing out prominently what is universal and true of the whole 
of modern humanity. In typifying the life of all classes of modern 
Russia, he paints a picture of the collective civilized world of the 
present in its most fundamental manifestations. 

It is impossible thus far to know with certainty what the verdict 
of the future will be as regards the relative importance of Tolstoi 
the artist, and Tolstoi the ethical teacher and man. While scarcely 
any one denies the permanent quality of his artistic work, there are 
many predictions, some of them very positive and dogmatic, that his 
teaching will soon be forgotten ; but there are some who lay particular 
emphasis on his work as a devotee. It is safe to predict that he will 
long be studied, if not for the strength and beauty of his great art, 
at least for the challenge flung at modernity by his creed and his 
spirit, which makes his life-work of greater significance to humanity 
than that of any of the great European artists since Byron's day. 

TOLSTOI'S PHILOSOPHY.* 
GENERAL PRINCIPLES : 

Tolstoi bases his philosophy on love as the first principle, from 
which he deduces the corollary : " Resist not evil " ; that is to say, 
do not oppose violence with violence. Hence, Tolstoi regards him- 
self as a follower of the Christian teaching. Tolstoi's Christianity, 
however, is purely the doctrine of Christ. It repudiates every es- 
tablished church, whether Greek, Catholic or Protestant. The 
churches, he declares, have nothing in common with the Christian 
teaching save the name. They are founded on anti-Christian prin- 
ciples and are hostile to Christianity. The church is presumption, 
violence, self-assertion, rigidity and death. Christianity is meek- 
ness, repentance, submissiveness, progress and life. The church 
having once given way to the world, followed it ever after. The 
world organized its existence in direct opposition to the doctrine of 
Christ, and the church invented metaphors according to which it ap- 

* A systematic exposition of Tolstoi's philosophy as gathered from his various 
religious and philosophical works. To secure accuracy, his own language has been 
letained as far as possible in this as well as in the sketch of Tolstoi's theory on art 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 9 

peared that men who really lived contrary to the law of Christ lived 
in accordance with it. And the world began to lead a life which 
rapidly grew worse than that of the pagans, and the church began 
to justify this way of living, and to affirm that it was strictly in 
accordance with the doctrine of Christ. 

Tolstoi does not believe in supernatural revelation, nor in the 
superhumanity of Christ. Indeed, he rejects all dogmas whatso- 
ever. By God, he understands the spirit dwelling in man, that 
spirit which every one recognizes within him and which he is con- 
scious of as being free, rational, and independent of the flesh. In 
this sense it was that Christ called himself the son of God, just as 
every man is the son of God, according to the spirit. All the miracu- 
lous tales concerning his birth and resurrection, Tolstoi declares to 
be utterly foreign to the spirit of Christ's doctrine, and the invention 
of a coarse conception. 

Cleared of their supernatural encumbrances, the teachings of 
Christ find their justification on grounds of pure reason. The belief 
in Christ is not a belief in the personality of Christ, but a recognition 
of the truth. Reason is the law recognized by man, according to 
which he must work out his life. Since, however, there is no higher 
reason outside of oneself, one's own reason must become the highest 
and sole guide in the conduct of life. And the more one's life is con- 
ducted according to the dictates of reason, the more it is subor- 
dinated to mere animal existence, the better will that life be. 

Formerly, beliefs were imposed on men. They were not the 
products of reason. When, through increased intercourse, people 
learned to know other religions, and were led to reflect as to which 
was the true one, it was reason alone that could decide for them. 
It is by reason and not by faith that men attain to a recognition of 
the truth. The law of truth reveals itself to man gradually. It has 
revealed itself for the first time in the midst of a heathen world, to 
a man said to be Christ. The teaching of Christ is reason itself. It 
contains the only rules of life whereby it is possible to live according 
to reason, and hence no one resting himself on reason, has the right 
to renounce it. 

The love declared by Christ as the highest principle is not what 
people usually comprehend under that name. To men who do not 



10 TOLSTOI: 

understand life, love is merely that which contributes to their own 
well-being. Their love for wife, children, friends, is only another 
form of self-love. But true love is a constant denial of self for the 
sake of another ; it is a condition of good-will toward all — a condi- 
tion natural in children, but which in adults can be brought about 
only by means of self-renunciation ; it is an ideal of complete, endless 
and divine perfection. And in the nearest approach to this divine 
perfection of which every man is conscious within himself, but 
which can be reached only in endlessness, consists the true life 
according to the teaching of Christ, instead of, as was formerly 
believed, in the fulfilment of commandments, in the fulfilment of the 
law. Since, moreover, love, according to Christ, is the highest law, 
and the teachings of Christ are founded on reason, love must also be 
based on reason. Love is the only reasonable activity of man and is 
that which solves all the contradictions of human "life. It gives to life 
that which, in view of the fact of death, would be meaningless, a 
meaning independent of time and space. 

Tolstoi believes that there are three and only three views of 
life : First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life ; 
second, embracing the society or the pagan view of life ; third, em- 
bracing the whole world, or the divine view of life. In the first 
theory of life, a man's life is limited to his own individuality; the 
aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In 
the second theory, a man's life is limited not to his own individuality, 
but to certain societies and classes of individuals : to the tribe, the 
family, the clan, the nation ; the aim of life is limited to the satis- 
faction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third 
theory a man's life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, 
but extends to the principle and source of life — to God. The motor 
power of his life is love. And his religion is the worship in deed 
and in truth of the principle of the whole — God. 

From the law of love follows necessarily the principle of non- 
resistance to evil. " Resist not evil " means never resist evil ; that is. 
never offer violence to any one, never do anything which is opposed 
to love. The precept, not to resist evil, is one which contains the 
whole substance of Christ's doctrine, if we consider it not only as 
a saving but as a law we arc bound to obey. It is like a latch-key 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 11 

which will open any door, but only if it be well inserted into the 
lock. The law of love inevitably leads to the principle of non- 
resistance since it is impossible to find a sure, incontestable criterion 
for evil. What is evil to one may appear good to another.. People 
invested with sanctity considered that as an evil which to men 
and institutions invested with secular power appeared good, so that 
now men have arrived at the full recognition of the fact that an 
outward, universally binding definition of evil does not and can not 
exist. 

Non-resistance to evil, however, does not, according to Tolstoi, 
signify every form of resistance. Tolstoi intends to designate by 
the precept only resistance by force. In this sense, however, the 
principle is made applicable in its widest scope. We must not only 
not resist evil done to ourselves, but also that committed against our 
neighbor. In support of this Tolstoi quotes the words of Jesus 
addressed to Peter when the latter in Christ's defense struck the 
servant of the high priest with the sword : " All they that take the 
sword shall perish with the sword." Nor is the commandment 
applicable only to some, but binding on all. It forbids the use of 
violence by those who are in possession of power, as well as by those 
who are not. 

The Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoi declares, contains five pre- 
cepts all of which form but one of the steps in the approach to 
perfection. They are negative in character and therefore can be 
followed even at the present stage of man's life by all who strive 
after perfection. The first of this is : " Hold thy peace with every- 
one, and when peace is disturbed use all efforts to restore it ; " the 
second : " Let every man take but one woman and every woman but 
one man, and let none abandon the other under any pretext ; " the 
third : " Make no vows ; " the fourth, the most important of all, 
embodying the non-resistance principle : " Suffer vexation, do not 
repay evil with evil ; " and the fifth : " Do not break the peace in 
order to serve your interests." 

SPECIAL APPLICATIONS, (a) LAW. 

On the principle of non-resistance to evil Tolstoi rejects all 
law. Law is maintained by violence and hence it is impossible to 



12 TOLSTOI: 

admit the Godhead of Christ, the basis of whose teaching is non- 
resistance to evil, and at the same time to work consciously and un- 
concernedly for the institutions of property, courts of law, king- 
doms, the army and so on. There may have been a time when the 
violence of law was milder than the violence of individuals. Such, 
however, is no longer the case among the most highly developed 
peoples. Our dispositions have grown gentler. Men, nowadays, 
recognize the precept of love of the humankind, of pity for one's 
neighbor, and only desire the possibility of quiet, peaceful living. 
At any rate it would be much more simple to regulate our lives 
according to the doctrine of Christ ; and then, if courts of law, execu- 
tions and war were found indispensable to our welfare, we might pray 
to have them too. 

Formerly people believed in the supernatural origin of laws, and 
therefore could readily submit to them. From the very commence- 
ment of Christianity, however, it began to be understood that human 
laws, though given out for divine laws, were compiled by men, and 
can not be infallible, whatever the external majesty with which they 
are invested, and that erring men are not rendered infallible by 
assembling together and calling themselves a senate or any other 
name. Indeed, Christ himself directly repudiates law with the 
words: "Judge not and ye shall not be judged" (Matt. vii. i) ; 
"Condemn not and ye shall not be condemned" (Luke vi. 37), 
which mean that we are not only never to condemn our brother in 
word, that is by speaking evil of him, but that we must not institute 
courts of law for the condemnation of a fellow creature to punish- 
ment. Tolstoi said that the first point that struck him when he 
understood the commandment, " Resist not evil," in its true mean- 
ing, was that human courts were not only contrary to this command- 
ment, but in direct opposition to the whole doctrine of Christ, and 
that therefore he must certainly have forbidden them. Christ says, 
" Resist not evil." The sole object of courts of law is to resist evil. 
Christ enjoins us to return good for evil. Courts of law return 
evil for evil. In his prayer Christ enjoins all men, without any ex- 
ception, to forgive as they hope to be forgiven. Then how can a 
man judge and condemn another when, according to the faith he 
professes, he is bound to forgive? 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 13 

Another point he makes against the institution of law is that vio- 
lence under the fixed form of law condemns only that which public 
opinion has for the most part long ago disavowed and condemned ; 
and that while public opinion censures all the acts opposed to the 
moral law, the law which rests on violence condemns and punishes 
only a certain very limited range of acts, and by so doing seems 
to justify all other acts of the same kind which do not come under 
its scope. Public opinion ever since the time of Moses has regarded 
covetousness, profligacy and cruelty as wrong, and censured them 
accordingly. And it condemns every kind of manfestation of covet- 
ousness, not only the appropriation of the property of others by force 
or fraud or trickery, but even the cruel abuse of wealth ; it condemns 
every form of profligacy whether with concubine, slave, divorced 
woman, or even one's own wife ; it condemns every kind of cruelty, 
whether shown in blows, in ill-treatment, or in murder, not only of 
men but even of animals. The law resting on force punishes only 
certain forms of covetousness, such as robbery and swindling, cer- 
tain forms of profligacy and cruelty, such as conjugal infidelity, 
murder, and wounding. And in this way it seems to countenance 
all the manifestations of covetousness, profligacy, and cruelty, which 
do not come under its narrow definition. 

Love alone must govern the conduct of men. But to follow the 
precept of love is to accept the gospel of Christ as the guide of life, 
and were all to fulfil Christ's doctrine, the kingdom of God would 
be on earth. If only each one were to begin to do what we must do, 
and cease to do what we may not do, then the near future would 
bring the promised kingdom of Heaven, for the kingdom of God 
is not in the world without, but in the soul of man. The kingdom 
of God is but the following of the commandments of Christ, espe- 
cially the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount. 

The follower of Christ will be poor, Tolstoi believes, but he will 
enjoy the blessings given him by God. We have come to consider 
the word poverty as expressive of misery, yet it really is happiness. 
" He is poor " means that he does not live in a town, but in the 
country ; he does not sit idly at home, but labors in the fields or 
the woods ; he sees the sunshine, the sky, beasts, and birds ; he need 
not take thought what he shall do to excite his appetite, to facilitate 



14 TOLSTOI: 

his digestion/; but he feels hungry three times a day. He does not 
toss about on his soft pillow, thinking how to cure himself of sleep- 
lessness, but sleeps soundly after his work. He sees his children 
around him, he lives in friendly communion with men. The main 
point is that he is not obliged to do work which he hates, and he 
need not fear the future. He will be ill, suffer, die as others do (and 
judging by the way the poor suffer and die, his death will be an 
easier one than that of the rich) ; but he will doubtlessly have led a 
better life. We must be poor, we must be beggars, wanderers on 
the face of the earth ; that is what Christ taught us, and without it 
we can not enter the kingdom of God. 

(b) GOVERNMENT. 

Because Tolstoi believes that Christianity is opposed to law, he 
necessarily believes also that it puts an end to government which is 
based on law. No honest and serious-minded man of our day can 
help seeing the incompatibility of true Christianity — the doctrine of 
meekness, forgiveness of injuries and love — with government, its 
pomposity, acts of violence, executions, and wars. The profession 
of true Christianity not only excludes the possibility of recognizing 
government, but even destroys its very foundations. The state con- 
ception of life could be justified only so long as all men voluntarily 
sacrificed their personal interests to the public welfare. But so soon 
as there were individuals who would not voluntarily sacrifice their 
own interests, and authority, that is, violence was needed to restrain 
them, then the disintegrating principle of the coercion of one set 
of people by another set entered into the social conception of the 
organization based on it. 

It matters little what the form of government may be, he de- 
clares. The only difference is that under a despotic form of gov- 
ernment, the authority is concentrated in a small number of oppress- 
ors and violence takes a crude form ; under constitutional monarch- 
ies and republics, as in France and America, authority is divided 
among a great number of oppressors and the forms assumed by 
violence are less crude. 

Even if there was once a time when, owing to the low standard 
of morals, and the disposition of men to violence, the existence of 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 15 

an authority to restrain such violence, was an advantage, because 
the violence of government was less than the violence of individuals, 
one can not but see that this advantage could not be lasting. As 
the disposition of individuals to violence diminished, as the habits of 
the people became more civilized, and as power grew more demo- 
ralized through lack of restraint, this advantage disappeared. Men 
of the present day hate oppression, inequality, class distinction, and 
every kind of cruelty to animals, as well as to human beings. It 
may well be that there are people who can not help regarding all this 
(government administration) as necessary and indispensable. He 
does not dispute the question with them, he speaks for himself only ; 
but says with absolute certainty that he does not need it, and that 
he can not follow the conduct which it prescribes. 

Government is the rule of the wicked over the good. The whole 
history of pagan time is nothing but the narration of the manner 
and means by which the more wicked gained possession of power 
over the less wicked, and retained it by cruelties and deceptions, 
ruling over the good under pretense of guarding their rights and 
protecting them from the wicked. All the revolutions in history are 
only examples of the more wicked seizing power and oppressing the 
good. The wicked will always dominate the good, and will always 
oppress them. The governments of our day — all of them, the most 
despotic and liberal alike — have become what Hertzen so well called 
" Ghenghis Khan with the telegraph," that is to say, organizations 
of violence based on no principle but the grossest tyranny, and at 
the same time taking advantage of all the means invented by science 
for the peaceful collective social activity of free and equal men, used 
by them to enslave and oppress their fellows. 

It is said by those who defend the existing order of things that 
the suppression of government violence can be. possible and desirable 
only when all men have become Christians. So long as among 
people nominally Christians there are un-Christian wicked men, who 
for the gratification of their own lusts are ready to do harm to others, 
the suppression of government authority, far from being a blessing to 
others, would only increase their miseries. But in saying that ex- 
cept for the government the bad would oppress the good, the cham- 
pions of the existing order of things take it for granted that the 



16 TOLSTOI: 

good are those who at the present time are in possession of power 
and the bad are those who are in subjection to it. This would be 
true if the custom of our society were what is, or rather is supposed 
to be, the custom in China ; that is, that the good always rule, and 
that directly those at the head of government cease to be better than 
those they rule over, the citizens are bound to remove them. This 
is supposed to be the custom in China. In reality it is not so and can 
never be so. For to remove the heads of a government ruling by 
force, it is not the right alone, but the power to do so that is needed. 
So that even in China this is only an imaginary custom. And in our 
Christian world we do not even suppose such a custom, and we have 
nothing on which to build up the supposition that it is the good or 
the superior who are in power ; in reality it is those who have seized 
power and who keep it for their own and their retainers' benefit, and 
power is always seized by those who are less conscientious and less 
moral. The good can not seize power, nor retain it ; to do this, 
men must love power. And love of power is inconsistent with 
goodness ; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities — 
pride, cunning, cruelty. 

In the transitions of power within a state from one personage 
to another, the power has rarely passed from a worse person to a 
better one. When Louis XVI. was removed and Robespierre came 
to power, and afterward Napoleon— who ruled then, a better man 
or a worse? And when were better men in power, when the Ver- 
saillist party or when the Commune was in power? When Charles I. 
was ruler, or when Cromwell? And when Peter III. was czar, or 
when he was killed and Catherine was czarina in one half of Russia 
and Pugachev ruled the other? Which was bad then and which 
was good ? All men who happen to be in authority assert that their 
authority is necessary to keep the bad from oppressing the good, 
assuming that they themselves are the good par excellence, who pro- 
tect other good people from the bad. In reality, however, without 
the aggrandizement and the abasement of others, without hypocri- 
sies and deceptions, without prisons, fortresses, executions, ami 
murders, no power can come into existence or be maintained. 

Government rests on bodily violence. The possibility of apply- 
ing bodily violence to people is provided above all by an organiza- 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 17 

tion of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to one will. 
These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are what 
constitute the army. The army has always been and still is the 
basis of power. Power is always in the hands of those who control the 
army, and all men in power — from the Roman Caesars to the Russian 
and German emperors — take more interest in their army than in 
any thing, and court popularity therein knowing that if the army is 
on their side, their power is secure. 

Hitherto it has been supposed by those who submitted to state 
authority, that governments existed for their benefit; but the policy 
or even the unconscious tendency of those in power must always 
be to reduce their subjects to the extreme of weakness, for the 
weaker the oppressed, the less effort need be made to keep him in 
subjection. And therefore the oppression of the oppressed always 
goes on growing up to the furthest limit, beyond which it can not 
go without killing the goose with the golden eggs. And if the goose 
lays no more eggs, like the American Indians, negroes, and Fijians, 
then it is killed in spite of the sincere protests of philanthropists. 

Armies are maintained and strengthened by the governments not 
only to defend the state against other states but above all to keep 
enslaved their own subjects. That has always been necessary and 
has become more and more necessary with the increased diffusion 
of education among the masses, with the improved communication 
between people of the same and of different nationalities. It has 
become particularly indispensable now in the face of communism, 
socialism, anarchism, and the labor movement generally. Govern- 
ments feel that it is so and strengthen the force of their disciplined 
armies. In the German Reichstag not long ago, in reply to a ques- 
tion why funds were needed for raising the salaries of the under 
officers, the German Chancellor openly declared that trustworthy 
under officers were necessary to contend against socialism. Caprivi 
only said aloud what every statesman knows and assiduously con- 
ceals from the people. The reason to which he gave expression is 
essentially the same as that which made the French kings and popes 
engage Swiss and Scotch guards, and makes the Russian authorities 
of to-day carefully distribute the recruits in such a manner that the 
regiments from the frontiers are stationed in central districts, and 



18 TOLSTOI: 

the regiments from the center are stationed on the frontiers. The 
meaning of Caprivi's speech, put into plain language, is that funds 
are needed, not to resist foreign foes, but to buy under-omcers to 
be ready to act against the enslaved toiling masses. 

The violence of governments is made possible hy the violence 
which it exacts from its subjects. Government not only asks sub- 
mission to violence but demands violence and thus by means of uni- 
versal military service, it renders all citizens their own oppressors. 
It demands obedience by making the oath of allegiance obligatory 
on all Russian subjects on each new accession to the throne by a 
czar, by taxes applied to acts of violence, by obligatory police ser- 
vice, etc. 

Four methods are employed by the government to enlist its sub- 
jects in the work of violence, organized by the aid of science into a 
skilful system carried to 'such a point of perfection that every one 
is caught in the circle of violence and has no chance of escape from 
it. The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in 
representing the existing state organization — whatever it may be, 
free republic or the most savage despotism — as something sacred 
and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it with 
the cruelest punishments. This method is in use now — as it has been 
from olden times — wherever" there is a government ; in Russia 
against the so-called nihilists, in America against anarchists, in 
France against imperialists, legitimists, communards and anarchists. 

The second method is corruption. It consists of plundering the 
industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes, and 
distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are bound 
in return to support and keep up the oppression of the people. These 
bought officials, from the highest minister to the poorest copying 
clerks, make up an upbroken network of men bound together by the 
same interest — that of living at the expense of the people. They 
become the richer the more submissively they carry out the will of 
the government ; and at all times and places, sticking at nothing in 
all departments, support by word and deed the violence of govern- 
ments, on which their own property also rests. 

The third method is what Tolstoi describes as hypnotizing the 
people. This consists in checking the moral development of men 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 19 

and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life, 
outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government 
rests. This hypnotizing process is organized at the present in the 
most complex manner and starting from childhood, continues to act 
on men till the day of their death. It begins in their earliest years 
in the compulsory schools created for this purpose, in which the 
children have instilled into them, the ideas of life of their ancestors, 
which are in direct antagonism with the conscience of the modern 
world. In countries where there is a state religion, they teach the 
children the senseless blasphemies of the church catechisms, together 
with the duty of obedience to their superiors. In republican states, 
they teach them the savage superstition of patriotism and the same 
pretended obedience to the governing authorities. 

The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who 
have been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a 
certain number, exposing them to special and intensified means of 
stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive 
instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities needed 
by the government. Intimidation, corruption and hypnotism bring 
people into a condition in which they are willing to be soldiers ; the 
soldiers give the power of punishing and plundering them (and pur- 
chasing officials with the spoils) and hypnotizing them and convert- 
ing them in time into these same soldiers again. 

The gospel of Christ substitutes the law of love for the state. 
In a system founded on the precepts of love, men would live in 
universal brotherhood without recognizing any authority. Such a 
system is not only desirable but it is compatible with the present 
stage of moral development, for however ignorant or superstitious 
he may be, every man of the present day knows that all men have 
an equal right to life and the good things of life, and that one set of 
people are no better nor worse than another, that all are equal. 
Indeed he recognizes the impossibility of the existing order of things 
and the necessity for the establishment of new forms of life. Under 
the new order, men will also live in communities, but these com- 
munities will not be held together by promises, for Christ forbids 
the making of any vows. Society must be maintained by spiritual 
influence, for the man who follows a spiritual influence acts accord- 



20 TOLSTOI: 

ing to his own desires. The more spiritually advanced exert an 
influence over the less advanced, and the efficacy of this influence 
lies in the tendency of the less thinking people to follow the example 
of those who stand intellectually on a higher level. 

It is asked, how will the function at present performed by the 
government be fulfilled in the future state of society? In the first 
place, as to defense against the attacks of the evil-disposed. But 
who are those evil-disposed persons in our midst from whose attacks 
we are preserved by the state and its army? Even if three or four 
centuries ago, when men prided themselves on their war-like prow- 
ess, when killing men was considered a heroic achievement, there 
were such persons ; we know very well that there are no such per- 
sons now, that we do not nowadays carry or use fire-arms, but 
every one professes humane principles and feels sympathy for his 
fellows, and wants nothing more than we all do — that is, to be left 
in peace to enjoy his existence undisturbed. So that nowadays there 
are no special malefactors from whom the state could defend us. 
If by these evil-disposed persons, is meant the men who are punished 
as criminals, we know very well that they are not a different kind 
of beings like wild beasts among sheep, but are men just like our- 
selves, and no more naturally inclined to crimes than those against 
whom they commit them. We know that their number can be di- 
minished only by change of environment and moral influence. So that 
the justification of state violence on the ground of the protection it 
gives us from evil-disposed persons, even if it had some foundation 
three or four centuries ago, has none whatever now. 

Secondly, as to education, culture, means of communication, and 
so on. Without the state, it is said, men would not have been able to 
form the social institutions needed for doing anything. This argu- 
ment too was well founded only some centuries ago. If there was 
a time when people were so disunited, when they had so little means 
of communication and interchange of ideas, that they could not 
cooperate and agree together in any common action in commerce, 
economies, or education without the state as a center, this want of 
common action exists no longer. The great extension of means of 
communication and interchange of ideas has made men completely 
able to dispense with state aid in forming societies, associations, 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 21 

corporations, and congresses for scientific, economic and political 
objects. Indeed government is more often an obstacle than an 
assistance in attaining these aims. From the end of last century, 
there has hardly been a single progressive movement of humanity 
which has not been retarded by the government. 

Thirdly, it is claimed that without governments, nations would 
be enslaved by their neighbors. The government, they tell us, with 
its army, is necessary to defend us from neighboring states who might 
enslave us. But we know this is what all governments say of one 
another, and yet we know that all the European nations profess the 
same principles of liberty and fraternity, and therefore stand in no 
need of protection against one another. And if defense against bar- 
barous nations is meant, one-thousandth part of the troops now under 
arms, would be amply sufficient for that purpose. Moreover, a society 
based on the precepts of Christ which inflicts no injury on any one, 
and where the surplus of labor is given away to others, can have 
no fear of murder or torture at the hands of an enemy, whether it 
be the Germans, the Turks, or savages. They can take away only 
what the people would have voluntarily given to them. 

With regard to the new order of things, it is impossible to know 
precisely the detailed forms it will assume. But this uncertainty 
ought not to deter men from striving to attain the new life. If 
Columbus had allowed himself to be guided by such considerations 
he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off 
on the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one 
had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By 
this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of 
the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished man- 
sion to another and a better one, it would make it much easier; but 
unluckily there is no one to get humanity's new dwelling ready for 
it. The future is even worse than the ocean — there is nothing there 
— it will be what men and circumstances make it. 

It is not even this question " What will happen?" that agitates 
men as much when they hesitate to fulfil the Master's will, as they 
are troubled by the question how to live without those habitual 
conditions of life which we call civilization, culture, art and science. 
But all these we know are only various manifestations of truth, and 



22 TOLSTOI: 

the change that is before us is to be made only for the sake of a 
closer attainment and realization of truth. How then can the 
manifestation of truth disappear through our realizing it? These 
manifestations will be different, higher, better, but they will not 
cease to be. Only what is false in them will be destroyed ; all the 
truth in them will only be stronger and more flourishing. 

The unknown world on which men are entering in renouncing 
their habitual ways of life, appears itself as dreadful to them, but 
if a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know 
his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It 
is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a program of the 
life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the 
surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating 
in the same place. The conditions of the new order of life can not 
be known by us because we have to create them by our own labors. 
That is all that life is, to learn the unknown, and to adapt our 
actions to this new knowledge. That is the life of each individual 
man, and that is the life of human societies and of humanity. 

(c'l PROPERTY. 

Together with laws, Tolstoi repudiates property maintained by 
law. Even if this system were necessary in the past when the sense 
of fellowship and humaneness was not as strong in men as it is at 
present, the existing organization has outlived its time, and must 
inevitably be reconstructed on new principles. Even if property 
did not exist, there would be no wild scramble among men of to-day 
for the possession of goods, for every one recognizes nowadays the 
commandment of universal love, and every one knows that all men 
have an equal right to life and the good things of life. 

Property is opposed to love and to the principle of absolute 
equality among men. It is based on violence inasmuch as it makes 
the poor dependent on the rich, and hence the rich are guilty by the 
very fact of being rich. It is a crime that some should live in super- 
abundance and luxury while thousands suffer from the want of the 
bare necessities of existence. 

Property is the right to the exclusive use of certain objects by 
their owner whether the owner need them or not. But according to 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 23 

* 

the law of love which forbids the accumulation of wealth and com- 
mands that each man devote all his life-work for others without 
demanding the labor of his fellowmen, and sharing all he has with 
them — according to that law, every man who does what work he can, 
should have as much but only as much as he requires. 

A living example of a state of things where property is non- 
existent, and goods are held in common, is afforded by the Russian 
colonists. These on settling on a piece of ground begin to work it, 
and it does not occur to them that any one who does not make use 
of the soil can have any right to it; on the contrary, the colonists 
naturally regard the land as common property and consider every 
man thoroughly justified in plowing and gathering where he will. 
They make implements for the tilling of the soil, the laying out of 
gardens, and the construction of houses, and again it does not enter 
their minds that these could yield an income in and for themselves ; 
on the contrary, the colonists look on every kind of profit from the 
means of production, on all interest for borrowed grain, and so on, 
as an injustice. They work on a land and soil free from any kind 
of a master, with instruments of labor of their own, or borrowed 
without interest ; each for himself or all together on a common basis. 
Such communal societies are not peculiar to the Russian colonists 
alone. They have existed at all times and still exist wherever the 
natural condition of man's life has not in some manner been dis- 
turbed. 

d) THE REALIZATION 

The realization of the new life based on the principles of love is 
to be brought about according to Tolstoi, not by the violent over- 
throw of the present order of things, but by the refusal of every man 
who has arrived at a recognition of the truth, to take a hand in the 
work of the various institutions which support this system — law, 
government, property — and by the endeavor of each to bring as 
many others as possible to a recognition of the same truth, that is, 
of the necessity for every true Christian to strive toward a consum- 
mation of that condition of life in which it shall be possible for all 
to live in consonance with reason and the law of love. 

As the wrongs of the present system are the outcome not of the 



24 TOLSTOI: 

inherent nature of man but of public opinion, it is necessary in 
order to the realization of a life in keeping with our recognition of 
the truth, to replace the present public opinion, no longer answering 
the inner convictions of men, by a new and living public opinion. 
There would be no way out of our present position except that a man 
(and thereby all men) is gifted with the power of forming a differ- 
ent, higher theory of life, which at once frees him from all the bonds 
by which he seems indissolubly fettered. This independence is 
gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing 
forms of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. 
This independence results from the Christian recognizing the law of 
love, revealed to him by his teacher, as perfectly sufficient for all 
human relations, and therefore he regards every use of force as un- 
necessary and unlawful. ' Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free." 

Those who have recognized the truth have it in their power 10 
bring about this change of public opinion. It must not be argued 
that because it took eighteen centuries for but a small section of 
humanity to pass over to Christianity, it must be many times eighteen 
centuries before all the remainder do the same. Men do not only 
assimilate a truth through recognizing it by prophetic insight, or by 
experience of life. When the truth has become sufficiently diffused, 
men at a lower stage of development accept it all widely at once 
simply through confidence in those who have reached it by the inner 
spiritual way, and are applying it to life. Public opinion has the 
power of working on men by infection, and with great rapidity gains 
a hold on great numbers of men. Just as a single shock may be 
sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at 
once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now 
that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over 
hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion con- 
sistent with conscience may be established and through this change 
of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And 
it depends on us to make this effort. 

The means to bring about the necessary change in public opinion 
consists, in the first place, in the putting into practise of the new 
theory of life by those who have recognized the truth. Truth is 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 25 

imparted to men by acts of truth. In reality, therefore, one ought, 
if a landowner, to give up the lands immediately to the poor; if a 
capitalist or manufacturer, to turn over the money to his work peo- 
ple; or if a czar, minister, official, judge or general, to renounce im- 
mediately the advantages of the position ; or if a soldier on whom all 
the system of violence is based, to refuse immediately to obey in 
spite of all the dangers of insubordination. But it may happen, 
and it is most likely, that he will not have the strength to do so. 
He has relations, a family, subordinates and superiors ; he is under 
an influence so powerful that he can not shake it off. 

Another effective means to the same end, is the free and open 
profession of the truth one has come to recognize. A man may not 
have it in his power to live up immediately to his new concept of life, 
but there is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to 
you to be free in life, that is, to profess the truth. If men, nay 
only single individuals, were to do this, then the old outlived public 
opinion would at once fall of itself and a new, living and present 
one spring up in its place. If men who had arrived at the new 
conception were but bold enough to speak their minds, the uselessness 
or stupidity and even inconvenience of the present institutions would 
soon become obvious to all. Those who fill offices based upon 
violence would find themselves in the position of the emperor in 
Andersen's tale of " The Emperor's New Clothes," for directly 
some one who has no interest in concealing their uselessness will 
exclaim in all simplicity : " But these people have been of no use to 
any one for a long time past ! " 

In order to bring about the abolition of the present system — law, 
government, property — it is further necessary that men who have 
come to a recognition of the truth, should live in accordance with 
that truth, refusing to take part in any of the acts of violence de- 
manded by the present order. It is through the efforts of the 
people themselves that the new order of life can be brought into the 
world. 

Not by means of violence, however, must the present order be 
abolished. The method of the revolutionary enemies is that of 
attacking the government from without. Christianity does not at- 
tack it at all, but from within it destroys all the foundations on which 



26 TOLSTOI: 

government rests. The revolutionists say: "The form of govern- 
ment is bad in this respect and that respect; we must overturn i 1 
and substitute this or that form of government," under which, they 
maintain, " oppression will be unnecessary.'" But they deceive them- 
selves. Even if we admit that under a combination of circum- 
stances specially unfavorable for the government, as in France in 
1870, any government might be forcibly overturned and the power 
transferred to other hands, the new authority would rarely be less 
oppressive than the old one ; on the contrary, always having to defend 
itself against its dispossessed and exasperated enemies, it would be 
more despotic and cruel, as has always been the rule in all revolu- 
tions. 

The ameliorations of life must be brought about as the result 
of the personal efforts of individual men. Those who recognize the 
Christian teaching must refuse all support of the present order, re- 
fuse to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refuse to pay 
taxes, refuse to take part in law proceedings or in military service, 
and live in accordance with his new conception of life. It is thus 
that every man can free himself. The Christian is independent of 
every human authority by the fact that he regards the divine law 
of love, implanted in the soul of every man, and brought before his 
consciousness by Christ, as the sole guide of his life and other men's 
also. 

Cases of refusing to comply with the demands of the government 
when they are opposed to Christianity, such as swearing allegiance 
to the government, the payment of taxes, acting as jurymen, and 
especially serving in the army, are of late occurring everywhere — in 
Russia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France and Sweden — and 
are becoming more and more frequent. The governments are power- 
less against them, for in all these cases, the motives given are so 
excellent that, however despotic governments may be, they could 
hardly punish them. To punish men for refusing to act against 
their consciences, the government must renounce all claim to good 
sense and benevolence. Governments can of course, flog to death 
or execute or keep in perpetual imprisonment all enemies who want 
to overturn them by violence. But what can they do against men 
who, without wishing to overturn or destroy anything, desire simply 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 37 

for their part to do nothing against the law of Christ, and who, 
therefore, refuse to perform the commonest state requirements, which 
are, therefore, the most indispensable to the maintenance of the state ? 
The socialists, the communists, the anarchists, with their bombs and 
riots and revolutions, are not nearly so much dreaded by govern- 
ments as these disconnected individuals coming from different parts, 
and all justifying their non-compliance on the ground of the same 
religion, which is known to all the world. 

It may be asserted that no significance can be attached to a few- 
scattered cases of individual men refusing to comply with the de- 
mands of the government ; that it would be necessary that all the 
coarse, half-savage men completely incapable of appreciating Chris- 
tianity or acting on it, of whom there are always a great many in 
every Christian society, should be converted to Christianity before 
the Christianizing process could so affect all men one after another 
that they would pass from the heathen to the Christian conception 
of life. This criticism would be perfectly just, if the transition from 
one conception of life to another were only accomplished by the 
single process of all men, separately and successively, realizing, 
each for himself, the emptiness of power, and reaching Christian 
truth by the inner spiritual path. But there is also another external 
means by which men reach Christianity and by which the transition 
is less gradual. This transition from one organization of life to 
another is not accomplished by degrees like the sand running through 
the hour-glass, grain after grain. It is more like the water filling a 
vessel floating on water. At first the water only runs in slowly on 
one side, but as the vessel grows heavier it suddenly begins to sink, 
and almost instantaneously fills with water. It is just the same 
with the transitions of mankind from one conception — and so from 
one organization of life — to another. At first only gradually and 
slowly, one after another, men attain to the new truth by the inner 
spiritual way, and follow it out in life. But when a certain point in 
the diffusion of the truth has been reached, it is suddenly assimilated, 
by every one, not by the inner way, but as it were involuntarily. 

If not for further endeavor of each individual to live up to the 
new truth, it would never be possible for men in the aggregate to 
attain the new life. Men in their present condition are like a swarm 



28 TOLSTOI: 

of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees 
on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They 
must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees 
knows this, and desires to change its own, and the others' position, 
but no one of them can do it. They can not all start off at once, 
because one hangs on to another and hinders it from separating 
from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It 
would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just 
as it seems that worldly men caught in the toils of the state concep- 
tion of life, can never escape. And there would be no escape for the 
bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed 
with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men 
if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering 
into a Christian conception of life. If every bee who could fly, did 
not try to fly, the others too would never be stirred, and the swarm 
would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered 
the Christian conception of life, would not, without waiting for other 
people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind 
would never change its position. But let only one bee spread its 
wings, start off, and fly away, and after it another and another, 
and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm 
of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as 
Christianity teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and 
another do the same, and the enchanted circle of existence in the 
state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be 
broken through. 

If every man of the present order, who recognizes Christianity, 
were to live in accordance with it, the ruling authorities would soon 
find themselves in the position of a conqueror who is trying to save 
a town which has been set on fire by its own inhabitants. Directly 
he puts out the conflagration in one place, it is alight in two other 
places ; directly he gives in to the fire and cuts off what is on fire 
from a large building, the building itself is alight on both ends. 
These separate fires may be few, but they are burning with a flame 
which however small a space it starts from, never ceases till it has set 
the whole ablaze. 

However small the number of men who can arrive at a recogni- 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 29 

tion of new truths through their inner spiritual intuition, all men 
in varying degrees according to their age, their education, and their 
race, are capable of understanding the new truths ; and first those 
who are nearest. to the men who have attained the new truth by 
spiritual intuition, slowly and one by one, but afterward more and 
more quickly, pass over to the new truth. Thus the number of men 
who accept the new truth becomes greater and greater, and the 
truth becomes more and more comprehensible. And thus more con- 
fidence is aroused in the remainder who are at a less advanced stage 
of capacity for understanding the truth. And it becomes easier for 
them to grasp it, and an increasing number accept it. And so the 
movement goes on more and more quickly, and on an ever-increasing 
scale, like a snowball, till at last a public opinion in harmony with 
the new truth is created, and then the whole mass of men is carried 
over all at once by its momentum to the new truth and establishes 
a new social order in accordance with it. 

TOLSTOI ON ART: 

Tolstoi's celebrated essay " What is Art " embodies the result of 
fifteen years of study and reflection. After reviewing the principal 
theories on art from Baumgarten to Herbert Spencer and Grant 
Allen, he finds them all unsatisfactory and proceeds to formulate 
his own principle. 

Art, according to Tolstoi, must not be considered as a means 
of pleasure. It is one of the conditions of human life, one of the 
means of intercourse between man and man. Like speech, art 
serves as a vehicle of communication among men, the difference 
being that, whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to 
another, by means of art he transmits his feelings. 

The activity of art is based on the capacity of man to receive 
another man's expression of feelings and experience those feelings 
himself. Hence, art begins when one person, with the object of join- 
ing another or other to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses 
that feeling by certain external indications. Art, therefore, must 
be infectious. The spectators or auditors must be infected by the 
feelings which the author has felt. From this follows the full 
definition : " Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one 



30 TOLSTOI: 

man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to 
others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are in- 
fected by these feelings and also experience them." 

The infection produced by an art-creation must be spontaneous. 
If a man without exercising effort and without altering his stand- 
point, on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences 
a mental condition which unites him with that man, and with other 
people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking 
that condition is a work of art. Infection, moreover, is not only 
a necessary condition of art, but the degree of infection is the sole 
criterion of excellence in art. 

According to the standard of excellence art is to be distinguished 
into two classes : first, religious art, and, second, universal art. The 
first, religious art, transmitting both positive feelings of love to God 
and one's neighbor, and negative feelings of indignation afld horror 
at the violation of love, manifests itself chiefly in the form of words, 
and to some extent also, in painting and sculpture ; the second kind, 
universal art, transmitting feelings accessible to all, manifests itself 
in words, in painting, in sculpture, in dances, in architecture, and 
most of all in music. 

Art being a mode of intercourse between man and man, a condi- 
tion of human life, it follows that true art must appeal to all men, 
must be on a level with the common experiences of humanity. In 
so far as it becomes exclusive, and capable of interesting only a small 
portion of mankind, it is untrue. The object of art is to make at- 
tainable by all men that feeling of brotherhood now attained only 
by a few of the best men in society. Art is a means of union among 
men, joining them in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life 
and progress toward the well-being of individuals and of humanity. 

Hence we. ought to repudiate the rude savage, and, for us, often 
meaningless works of the ancient Greeks : Sophocles, Euripides, 

Aeschylus and especially Aristophanes; of modern writers, Dante, 
Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare ; in painting, Michael Angelo's absurd 
" Last Judgment," and every representation of miracles, including 
Raphael's " Transfiguration " ; in music all but Bach's famous violin 
aria, Chopin's nocturne in E flat major, and certain parts from the 
works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Chopin. On 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 31 

the other hand Tolstoi instances as examples of the highest art such 
works as " The Robbers " by Schiller, " Les Pauvre Gene " and 
" Les Miserables " by Victor Hugo, the works of Dickens, of Dos- 
toievsky especially his " Notes from a Dead House," " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," George Eliot's " Adam Bede " ; in painting, a picture by 
Walter Langley in the Royal Academy of 1897, a picture by the 
French artist Morlan, and the pictures by Millet, especially his 
" Man with the Hoe." 

ANALYTIC STUDY OF TOLSTOI'S WRITINGS. 

Tolstoi's writings fall naturally into two classes: 

I. The Purely Literary. 
II. The Ethico=SocioIogical. 

With the exception of a few short novels, three dramas and " Resurrec- 
tion," all of Tolstoi's literary writings were written during the first period 
of his life (1828- 1878), while those of the second class, the ethico-sociological 
writings, belong exclusively to the second period of his life (1878-1901), the 
period of his so-called moral regeneration. 

Period I. (1828=1878). Purely Literary Productions. 

"Memories: Childhood, Boyhood, " Notes of a Marker " (1856). 

Youth" (1852-57). " The Two Hussars " (1856). 

The Caucasian Stories (1854-56): "Albert" (1857). 

" The Cossacks." "Lucerne" (1857). 

"The Invaders." "Three Deaths" (1859). 

"The Wood Cutting Expedition." "Family Happiness" (1859). 

"Snowstorm." "Polikushka" (i860). 

" An Old Acquaintance." " Kholstomier " (1861). 

The Crimean Stories (1854-1855) : " War and Peace" (1865-68). 

"Sevastopol in Dec, 1854, in " Anna Karenina " (1874-78). 
May, 1855, in Aug., 1855." 

Period I. Purely Literary Writings. 

The original character of Tolstoi's creative talent is amply revealed in his 
earliest compositions. In these are already clearly manifested the matchless 
vividness of portraiture, the strong sense for the real in life, the love of detail, 
the extraordinary capacity for observation, the dislike of all that is purely 
imaginative and artificial, the simplicity of diction, and the detached and 
natural manner of narration. 

Tolstoi almost invariably depicts his own experience. All his persons are 
real. The events he describes are either those in which he has himself 



32 TOLSTOI: 

participated, or such as are paralleled by his experiences. He paints his own 
character over and over again in its various phases, and draws on his own 
rich life for the background. It is this feature, added to his remarkable talent 
for accurate reproduction, which so impresses the reader with a sense of the 
real and inevitable in his works. 

In his earliest novels, " Memories," " A Morning in the Life of a Landed 
Proprietor," " Notes of a Marker," and " Lucerne," Tolstoi portrays the auto- 
biographic character of Nikolai and Irteniev and Prince Nekhludov through 
various incidents and stages of development, the unifying theme in all being 
the evil consequences of a false and artificial education. Noble natures at 
heart, they became mere word-heroes and whimsical eccentrics, and at their 
first contact with the actual world show their incapacity to cope with the 
problems of existence, and are soon driven to wreck and ruin. 

Tolstoi's greatest literary writings of his first period are his novels " War 
and Peace " and " Anna Karenina ; " and " Resurrection " of his second 
period. Of these, " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina " rank highest 
among his compositions, and are so far above anything he had written before 
that they took literary Russia by surprise and quickly gained a universal 
reputation. 

" War and Peace." 

" War and Peace " is an epic of the time of the Ru ,,ian Napoleonic war. 
Its action extends from 1805 to 1820. War is the symbol of the epoch, but it 
is nowhere Tolstoi's method to give particular prominence to merely battles 
and public events as such; and in this, his chief work, it is apparent from the 
second part of the title that his aim and scope are far more comprehensive. 
In fact, he unfolds before us a picture of the entire Russia of that time, and 
reveals the life of the people of the period in its various phases and depths, 
with a thoroughness and completeness that make its equal in any of the 
world' <= literature still to be supplied. 

Three spheres of life are presented, to us, three families whose fortunes 
we follow down to the minutest detail. In the Bolkonskis family we have 
the father, an old general of Catherine's time; the son, Andrei, statesman and 
soldier, who takes active part in all the varying fortunes of the country; the 
daughter, Princess Maria, full of devotion, self-forgetful, all pure love. 
Without affectation we find the past, present, and future of Russian life mir- 
rored in them. The Rostov family belongs to that good, honest, mediocre 
class, the members of which are swept along by the current of life, having 
no ideas which determine them, and which become significant in their coun- 
try's history. In contrast to these genuine, national, and society types is pre- 
sented a solitary skeptic, Count Pierre Bezukhov. He possesses a really kind, 
honest heart, but is prevented from accomplishing much g od by a certain 
helplessness and aimlessness which characterize him. 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 33 

If a modern Iliad is possible, " War and Peace " is the Russian Iliad. 
Historians have described and sketched for us on the basis of authentic 
sources the contemporary Russian society, Napoleon's and Kutuzov's plans 
of operation, the character of Napoleon, Murat, Devoust, Czar Alexander, 
Kutuzov, Bagration, Speranski, Rostopchin. The merest details of the in- 
vasion of Russia by the French and their remarkable retreat are familiar. 
The historians have forgotten but one thing (for which, however, they are 
not to blame) : To breathe life into the events and characters. It is just in 
this that Tolstoi has succeeded. He has solved the highest problem of his- 
tory and of poetry, has blended fact and poetry into the highest living truth. 
The times, the people, the intellectual currents, the inner life of single indi- 
viduals as well as of the masses, the " historically great," the trivial — all 
this rises vividly before our mental vision in forms of flesh and blood; we 
see the single storms, which together constitute the character of an epoch, 
out of which the process of historical life is developed. In a word, we learn 
what history does and how it makes itself. And hence " War and Peace " is 
at once a grand historic painting and romance. Both are most intricately 
interwoven and form a harmonious and inseparable whole. To false great- 
ness the poet wished to oppose true greatness as he conceived it. This con- 
trast is embodied not only in the Russian chief commander, Kutuzov, and in 
Napoleon, but runs through all the moments of Russia's great national 
struggle against Napoleon. 

In general the manifold phases and movements of war are so drawn that 
we can see into the sv :1 of each single soldier, whether he be under the fire 
of the cannon, or in a cavalry attack, whether in flight, in the hospital, or in 
the camp by a cozy fire. All this is usually depicted after the impressions of 
an eye-witness. The other, the peaceful historic characters, are drawn also 
with a masterly hand. With a few keen strokes the poet knows how to present 
the man bodily before us with the full peculiarity of his nature : so Rostopchin, 
the minister Speranski, the diplomat Bilibin, the court dame Anna Scherer. 
The salon of the latter is introduced into the book, with Count Wasili Kura- 
gin, the Countess Helene Bezukhov, his daughter, Pierre Bezukhov and the 
foreigners, the Rustov and Bolkonski families, the notorious and wild circle 
of the then jcnnesee doree of the highest rank, with Anatole Kuragin, Pierre, 
and Dolokhov at its head; and on the other side the typical aristocrat of the 
old'stamp, who would not yield a tittle of his ancestral pride, eternally moody 
and domineering over all around him, and particularly over his daughter 
Marie — this queer old man who despises Prince Bolkoncki, Bonaparte and 
the whole world, and shows himself a " Roman " at the moment when his son 
Andrei goes to war : " Remember this one thing. Prince Andrei," he says, 
with emotion, " if you are killed, it will pain the old man, your father, but 
if I learn that you have not borne yourself like the son of Nikolai Bolkonski, 
then I shall be aN'hamed." And Prince Andrei, one of the chief personages of 
the novel, fights, loves and dies as'aristocrat not only by birth but also in heart. 



U TOLSTOI: 

The old prince himself dies of a broken heart when he hears that the enemy 
had penetrated into the interior of the country. 

The chief interest of the novel (the work really contains several novels 
interwoven) centers in the process of the inner enlightenment of Prince 
Andrei and his remarkable friend Count Pierre Bezukhov, the two typical 
representatives of the better Russia of the beginning of the 19th century. 
The enlightenment is brought about in a different manner in the two; in 
Andrei Bolkonski, on his death-bed, after being fatally wounded at Boro- 
dino; in Pierre, in the French prison at Moscow, under the influence of a 
companion in suffering, the simple soldier and peasant Platon Karataiev. 
Both Andrei and Pierre are " Sturmer und Dranger " (" Stormers and 
Stressers ") of their age. In them the first revolutionary ferment of the 
Russian intellectual world attains full expression. They find no satisfaction 
either in the engrafted ideals of their own circle, or in the large world, or 
in the self-satisfied tone of the salon-patriotism, or in family life — the hollow 
product of this same world — or in the vague strivings of the philanthropists 
of freemasons. They find no outlet from the labyrinth of their own dark 
cravings until the overwhelming spectacle of mutual destruction, the fearful 
slaughter, the annihilation of the hopes and expectations of hundreds of 
thousands of suffering, dying and killed men, friends and foes, the unworthy 
doings of the self-authorized executors of the " nation's will," rush in on 
them. Finally, Andrei's own disappointed romance with the beloved and 
love-reciprocating, Natasha Rostov, breaks his haughtiness and pride and he 
bows himself before the weight of circumstances, in which he recognizes God's 
providence, even though already at the threshold of the grave. Otherwise is 
the experience of Count Pierre Bezukhov, this great child with the strength 
of a lion, so easily stirred, this colossus with the soul of a child, open to all 
goodness, and yet harborlessly and aimlessly drifting hither and thither like 
a light boat tossed on a stormy sea ; through the manifold mazes of the 
labyrinth into which youthful follies lead him, his unhappy marriage with a 
wicked society woman who had become his wife in a manner incomprehensi- 
ble to himself, through the meaningless formalism of freemasonry, he is like- 
wise drawn into the whirl of international events ; and thrown together by 
chance with the wounded captured soldier Platon Karataiev in the burning 
city of Moscow, occupied by the French, there opens up to him an altogether 
new world of which he had not dreamed. Karataiev, the simple man, who 
in his plainness of heart and faithful submissiveness brings love to all whom 
he meets, and out of his rich treasury of soul and mind scatters golden seeds 
of deep wisdom of life and of pure human love — Karataiev teaches Pierre to 
yield submissively to Providence that sends good or bad fortune according to 
heavenly counsel. Karataiev is the embodiment of the principle of love of 
one's neighbor. After his " moral regeneration " Pierre partakes again of the 
highest earthly happiness. Natasha becomes his wife, and in the last part of 
the work Tolstoi gives us glimpses of their happy family life. The sister 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 35 

of Andrei Bolkonski, the much tried Princess Marie, marries the good, honest, 
even though very ordinary Rostov ; and the picture of these two young fami- 
lies form a significant peaceful epilogue to the stirring times of war. 

" Anna Karenina." 

The composition of " Anna Karenina " is as rich in episodes as " War 
and Peace," but it deals exclusively with contemporaneous family and country 
life. Here also the novel is composed of several interwoven plots, but, as 
always in Tolstoi, it is extremely simple with regard to external incident. 
Anna Karenina, the wife of a high-placed official in Moscow, is seized with 
an irresistible love for a young brilliant officer, Alexei Vronski. She be- 
comes faithless to her husband, discards all social and practical considera- 
tions, leaves her family and yields herself entirely to her passion, tasting 
unrestrainedly all the delights of her mad intoxication. When she awakens 
to sober judgment, she becomes conscious of the horrible reality of her 
conduct and commits suicide. The other important episode running through 
the story is that of the love, marriage and family life of the landed proprietor, 
Konstantine Levin, and of Kitty Shcherbatski. The thread of connection of 
these with the other chief characters of the work is in their family relation- 
ship. Stepan Oblonski and his wife Daria, an unhappy family held together 
by merely ties of convention, are the brother and sister respectively of Anna 
Karenina and Kitty Shcherbatski. 

" Anna Karenina " is purely a novel, and a Russian novel, but it is not 
a novel in the ordinary sense of the word; there is, so to speak, no story. 
It is not the development of a certain plot, with a beginning, a middle, and a 
end; it is rather a succession of pictures, of scenes, some of which seem 
hardly to have any connection with the principal scenes. Such is Tolstoi's 
manner, so far as he has a manner. He paints life such as it is, sometimes 
solemn and sometimes dull ; tragical and commonplace — light and shadow 
constantly intermingled. 

We have in " Anna Karenina " two couples. One is Levin and his wife 
Kitty, who married for love, and the husband remains a lover. Kitty is very 
charming, very feminine and pure ; Levin is very good, very ordinary, very 
weak, jealous when he had not the slightest occasion to be jealous. He is 
an honest gentleman-farmer, timid, awkward ; he detests St. Petersburg and 
society, he is fond of his country-house, his peasants, his dogs, his horses. 
He writes a book on agriculture which he will never finish. He is a warm 
friend, a good neighbor, a capital shot. Tolstoi makes you positively see 
him, and you feel at the end of the book as if you had always known him, 
and gone with him after woodcock and heard him and Kitty discuss small 
domestic matters. They are happy, and their troubles are only like the small 
clouds that float a moment in a summer's sky and are soon absorbed by the 
warm rays of the sun. 

It is not so with Anna Karenina. She is lawless. She is one of the 



36 TOLSTOI: 

born rebels of the world. She admires, she even likes her husband — she can 
not love him ; and she loves another man, a handsome, spirited, fashionable 
young officer named Vronski. Fatality draws her to him, and he belongs 
to that class of men who may be said to recognize no duties except to 
themselves, no obedience except to their own desires and passions. He is a man 
without a conscience. He is not exactly the bold villain, the bandit, the 
outlaw, who has long been made prominent in literature. He is the correct 
man of the world who pays his gambling debts at the appointed time ; he is a 
brave, even a brilliant soldier, an accomplished courtier, but his code of morals 
is not inspired by any high law. He is eminently and essentially selfish, and 
knows no God but his own will. 

Anna Karenina is above him; she has a soul; she can feel commiseration 
and pity. She was made for good, not for evil ; but her fate has tied her to a 
husband who does not satisfy the cravings of her imagination and of her 
heart. She falls into the hands of Vronski like a bird fascinated by a serpent. 
When she feels herself, to her surprise and almost to her horror, in love, she 
tries to escape, but is drawn by degress into the vortex of passion. She has 
the Slavic impetuosity and the Slavic weakness. As soon as Anna has sinned 
the expiation begins. She begins almost at once to hate the cause of her sin. 
No outline can convey the powerful impression of her great personality, 
a personality colored by the various mental states through which she passes, 
dawning love, blind passion, maternal tenderness, doubt, apprehension, defi- 
ance, sorrow, and finally despair. The whole of a passionate woman's heart is 
laid bare. The realism of Anna Karenina is supreme and merciless. Its 
fidelity to the life it depicts, its strong delineation of character, above all its 
masterly treatment of a theme of world-wide interest places it among the 
leading novels of the century. 

It was first published as a serial in the Russian Contemporary, an English 
translation appearing in 1886, and instantly creating an enthusiasm. 

"Memories: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." 

" Memories : Childhood, Boyhood, Youth," is the story of the mental and 
moral development of a boy between the ages of 9 and 18. It consists en- 
tirely of recollections but not exclusively of his own life. Simple, unpretend- 
ing pictures from the life of a noble family in the country are presented. 
Brothers, sisters, parents, governess, teachers, servants are all introduced 
briefly characterized, and their relations to one another distinctly brought 
out — never through direct narrative, but incidentally through the natural 
progress of the story. The history of the inner life of the boy is revealed with 
close and delicate minuteness. First love, study, friendships, fancies, inclina- 
tions and dislikes — nothing is deemed too unimportant to make the picture 
complete. The speculative tendency of the author comes out as unmistakably 
in this, his first work, as does his artistic power of observation and repre- 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 37 

sentation. Under the influence of a gifted friend the young boy becomes 
absorbed in a question of abstract morality — the question of goodness and 
moral perfection, and he creates a world of thoughts, wishes and aims quite 
different from the world around him. 

" The Caucasian Stories." 

With the Caucasian stories begin those marvelous descriptions of war 
which culminate and find their highest expression in " War and Peace," and 
still stand unrivaled as the best productions of the kind in the world's litera- 
ture. The Caucasian stories include " The Invaders," " The Wood-Cutting 
Expedition," " An Old Acquaintance," " The Cossacks " and " Snowstorm." 

The chief of the Caucasian stories is " The Cossacks," the composition 
of which extended over a period of several years. The bare plot is so simple 
as to appear almost insignificant. Olenin, a young nobleman of the select 
St. Petersburg society, comes to the Caucasus, falls in love with the beautiful 
Cossack girl Marianka and wishes to marry her. She seems inclined to accept 
him, but in the mean time, Lukashka, a young spirited Cossack lad, to whom 
she had been engaged before, is accidentally wounded. This makes clear to 
her how strong a love she bears him. She rejects Olenin and he leaves the 
village and its wild inhabitants with their aboriginal life, their natural loves 
and passions, under the spell of which he had fallen for a time, and returns 
to the camp. 

In " Snowstorm " Tolstoi depicts a sleigh-ride through an endless white 
plain in the territory of the Don Cossacs, while the snow falls incessantly, and 
drifting into the air, is changed into a restless, wildly wriggling mass. It is 
a study in simple phraseology of the violent play of nature. 

" The Crimean Stories." 

More important than the Caucasian stories of war are the Crimean 
stories: "Sevastopol in December, 1854; Sevastopol in May, 1855, and Sevas- 
topol in August, 1855, an Epic Triology in Miniature." Forwarded from the 
scene of action and published in Russia, they at once earned Tolstoi a literary 
celebrity. They are simple portrayals of battles, not the din, the uproar and 
the large, general effects of war, but plain, life-like presentations of the be- 
havior of men under fire, revealing a remarkable mastery of every detail of 
warfare, and a rare psychologic understanding of the workings of the human 
spirit in extraordinary moments of impending danger. 

Other Works. 

'* A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor " paints Tolstoi's first 
experiences in his attempt at the improvement of the peasantry. Nekhludov, 
an energetic, highly educated aristocrat, desiring to introduce reforms for 
the amelioration of his peasants, visits their homes one Sunday in June, with 
the object of gathering information as to their needs. To his great disap- 



38 TOLSTOI: 

poiiitment he finds himself obstructed by the very people whom he had come 
to benefit. The peasants do not understand him, do not want to be helped, and 
show no need for the civilization which Nekhludov desires to introduce among 
them. 

With " Notes of a Marker " and " The Two Hussars " Tolstoi enters 
the field of the free story. He no longer confines himself to his own experi- 
ences and reminiscences, but the truth and reality of the presentation remain 
as marked as before. " Notes of a Marker " depicts the ruin of a youth in the 
thoughtless, corrupt, idle life of high society. 

In " The Two Hussars " the heroes belong to the same family but to 
different generations. They pass through the same experiences of love, 
enmity, folly, but each in quite a different fashion. In older Russia all is 
large, open, bold; in younger, small, concealed and artful. 

" Albert " is the story of a starved musician whom Tolstoi once took 
with him to the country. 

" Lucerne " is an episode from Tolstoi's travels in Switzerland. A poor 
wandering minstrel enters the Sweizerhof Hotel in Lucerne one evening and 
sings for its rich, fashionable inmates. They seem to enjoy his performance, 
but no one offers him the scantiest reward. This arouses the sympathy of 
Nekhludov, the narrator, and one of the guests at the hotel that evening. 
He befriends the simple, gifted singer, and invites him to sit down with him to 
a bottle of champagne. Although the singer's manners are irreproachable, this 
simple act of kindness draws upon Nekhludov the ridicule of the fashionable 
guests, who even begin to suspect his sanity. 

In " Three Deaths " Tolstoi treats the theme of the different manner 
in which beings on various scales of existence are affected by death. The 
higher the culture, the more painful is death. The peasant accepts death 
quietly and resignedly, as the rest of life. The noble lady suffers the torments 
of death years before the real death comes. Her very life had long since 
become a virtual death. But the mighty oak struck by the axe of the woods- 
man trembles in all its frame, and with one loud groan totters to the ground. 

" Family Happiness " is Tolstoi's first story of love. It follows no model 
and is as original in conception as his other works. The personal element 
is evident, and in describing the love sentiment through the female character 
he probably gives expression to his own feeling. But he is a matured man. 
He foresees the course of events. She is young and beautiful. She will love 
and seek for that life which to him appears so meaningless and hollow. Then 
in heavy, troubled nights, he will again find himself alone — a loneliness far 
worse than he had known before he found her. And even if she returns to 
him again, perhaps tainted with guilt — the man can not keep at a stand- 
still. Every year of his life presents new problems to him. He has new- 
interests, he becomes another man, he can not go back. She will want to 
return to the old, the first intoxication of love, which is only a point of 
transition. The rich friendship of mature growth will not satisfy her, and 
for him it is a necessity, a natural condition of life. 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 39 

" Polikushka " is the story of a poor servant who through the influence 
of bad company had become addicted to habits of stealing and drunkenness, 
without, however, losing the better sides of his character — his industry and 
good nature. He has a wife and five children. For the last seven months he 
has shown signs of improvement and given no cause for complaint. His 
mistress is interested in his well-being, and in order to restore in him a 
sense of self-esteem entrusts him with the collection of a considerable sum 
of money. Polikushka is proud of his errand and promises his wife to carry 
it out with scrupulous exactness, without yielding to temptation. On the 
way back he loses the money, returns home, answers his wife's questions 
moodily and brokenly, and then walks up to the garret and hangs himself on 
a beam. A neighbor sees his body and informs the wife of the accident. 
Leaving the child she has been bathing in the tub of water, she rushes madly 
up the stairway, where she drops down unconscious. On recovering, she 
finds the child drowned. Overcome by the fearful catastrophe she becomes 
demented and laughs and talks continuously. The village folk who were 
preparing to celebrate a holiday with music and dancing, crowd eagerly around 
the scene of accident and add to the general confusion. 

The tragedy is enhanced by the ironic commentary of the accompanying 
plot. The nephew of Dutlov, an old miser, is recruited for military service in 
place of Polikushka, whose choice had been benevolently hindered by the 
landlady to prevent his separation from wife and children. Dutlov might 
redeem his nephew with three hundred rubles. This he refuses to do, and there 
is a violent scene between the uncle and the nephew at the moment of parting. 
The nephew calls the old man a robber and a vampire, and has forcibly to 
be kept from attacking him. As Dutlov returns to the village he finds the 
money Polikushka had lost and brings it to the proprietress. But she, not 
yet recovered from the shock of the tragedy in her household, would have 
nothing to do with the ill-fated money. As Dutlov returns home he sees 
the dead body of Polikushka hanging from the beam. He has a terrible 
dream that night, springs up from his bed, hurries after his nephew, whom 
he succeeds in overtaking, and with the found money furnishes a substitute 
for him. Thus what had brought disaster to one family, where, whatever the 
temporary mistakes of the father, a general spirit of kindliness and gentleness 
pervaded, became the cause of the restoration of peace and happiness to 
another, whose ruin had been threatened by the niggardliness, stubbornness 
and hard-heartedness of its chief. 

" Kholstomier " is the story of a horse of noble stock that had once been 
the favorite of his master, but is now old and decayed and abandoned, and 
of the sport of his young, fresh, frisky and coddled companions in whose 
midst he had been placed to drag out his useless and wretched existence. At 
last Kholstomier, the horse, determines to tell them his history and prove 
to them he had once not been worse than they, and that the same fate 
awaited them in the end. He had always been a possession, always in the 



40 . TOLSTOI: 

power of another. He explains the conception of property and comes to the 
conclusion that the horse stands above men, for while the life of the former 
is based on action, man's activity manifests itself merely in words. Such 
words are in the first place all those which bear reference to property. He 
who can apply the word " mine " to the greatest number of things is regarded 
by men as the most fortunate. He says, " Why this is so, I can not tell, but it 
is so. At first I was at pains to explain this on account of some special ad 
vantage, but it soon appeared that this was false. Many of the people, foi 
instance, who called me their horse, did not ride me, others rode me. They 
did not feed me, others fed me. Kindness was shown me, not by those who 
called me their horse, but by the coachman, horse-doctors, and in general, 
strangers. Later, as the sphere of my observations extended, I convinced 
myself that it is not only with reference to the horse that the conception 
mine has no other basis than the low and animal instinct of men, which 
they call the sense of property or the right of property. The man says, ' The 
house is mine,' and does not live in it. He is only concerned about its con- 
struction and its preservation. There are men who call a piece of land ' mine ' 
and have never seen this land, and have never walked upon it. There are 
men who call other men ' mine ' and have never seen these men, and all 
their relations to these men consist in their doing harm to them. And men 
in their life do not strive to do that which they regard as good, but to call 
as many things as possible theirs. I am now convinced that in this consists 
the essential difference between men and us horses." 

Kholstomier is bought by a prince, and he is proud of having so dis- 
tinguished a master and of driving him to his mistress. One day the prince 
learns that his mistress has abandoned him. He pursues her with Kholstomier, 
running him so unreasonably that the horse becomes permanently crippled and 
enfeebled. He then passes on from one master to another, sinking lower and 
lower, until he reaches the condition described at the opening of this story. 
The prince is met with again in the story as a ruined man, partly dependent on 
the charitable support of a rich friend. A merciful stroke of the flayer at last 
relieves the horse from his miserable position, while the man is allowed to rot 
away alive. 

Period II. (1878=1901). Literary and Ethico=Soeiological Writings. 

Literary Writings. 

"Death of Ivan Ilich " (1885). 
"Power of Darkness" (1887), a drama. 
"Kreutzer Sonata" (1888). 
" Fruits of Culture " (1888), a drama. 
"The First Brewer" (1888), a drama. 
"Master and Workman" (1895). 
"Resurrection" (1900). 
"Who Is Right?" (1901). 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 41 

" Resurrection," a later novel, indicates by its very title Tolstoi's radical 
departure from his former method in his works of fiction. It is true that few 
of Tolstoi's compositions are purely works of art, that the didactic element 
is present in most of them, and is particularly conspicuous in " War and 
Peace " and " Anna Karenina." In all these, however, the ethical and 
philosophical themes of Tolstoi are for the most part merely supplementary. 
They do not enter organically into the works themselves, and can easily be 
distinguished from them. In " Resurrection," on the contrary, the artist is 
altogether discarded and the philosopher and moralist are allowed to hold 
the ground undisputed. If, in spite of all this, the artistic quality is evident 
throughout the work, and now and then rises to a height little if at all 
beneath the best in " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," it is because 
Tolstoi, being naturally an artist, his creations spontaneously and unwittingly 
assume the artistic form. 

The story is briefly this : The hero, a Russian nobleman, has in his 
youth betrayed a young woman of humble rank, a dependent on his family. 
When the story opens, ten years have elapsed. She has been driven to a 
life of shame; he has had the reckless career of the average officer and man 
of the world. One day he finds himself summoned to serve on a jury, and 
there he meets once more the woman whom he has wronged. She is accused of 
poisoning, and her case is one of those which he is required to consider. 
She is not guilty, yet she is convicted, partly through her own ignorance 
of the forms of law, and sentenced to exile. His nature is profoundly stirred 
by these happenings, for he is now old enough to take a serious view of life, 
and the predisposition to do so is not lacking. As he reviews his career his 
better self is awakened, and this is the " resurrection " to which the title has 
reference. In making us understand the workings of this man's mind, at this 
particular juncture, the author displays his highest powers, and gives us a 
piece of psychological analysis which has rarely been equaled. The upshot 
of it is that he determines as far as possible to atone for his crime by making 
the convict his wife and sharing her banishment to Siberia. But he pleads 
his cause with her in vain, for her soul is also experiencing a sort of " resur- 
rection," and she will not accept what she can not consider other than a 
sacrifice. He persists, however, in making the journey to Siberia and in 
doing what he can to ameliorate her condition. Eventually his efforts secure 
a commutation of her sentence, and she marries a fellow-prisoner. 

" The Death of Ivan Ilich " is a powerful psychologic study in which is 
depicted the slow, gradual and painful death in consequence of a seemingly 
slight injury to the once fresh and life-loving Ilich. 

" Kreutzer Sonata " is the story of a hasty love and marriage and its 
tragical consequences. Rozdnyschev becomes suspicious of his wife and kills 
her in a paroxysm of jealousy. The work is not only an arraignment of the 
present status of the family, but seems to be a plea against the union of 
man and woman in general and for the extinction of the human race. 



42 TOLSTOI: 

" Master and Workman " embodies the antique teaching of the vanity of 
riches. A timber-merchant — rough, coarse, and hard-hearted — goes to the 
forest with his man. loses his way and is caught in a snow-storm. He un- 
harnesses the horse, mounts it, and rides away, leaving his humble companion 
to his fate. The horse, failing to find its way through the tempest, brings 
him back to the sledge on which the workman is huddled, already stiff with 
cold, and half-buried in the snow. With a rush, the uselessness of the 
cowardly attempt he has just made to save his own life, and the vanity of all 
his past efforts to accumulate riches, which at such a moment have lost all 
value in his eyes, surge over the merchant's soul, sweep away the artificial 
layer of selfishness, and stir his underlying instinct of altruism and sympathy 
for his neighbor. His sole idea now is to bring back warmth, with his fur 
coat and with his own body to the poor wretch to whom he had not given a 
thought a little while ago. He stretches himself upon his body, and there, a 
few hours later, he is found in the same posture; he has brought his last 
undertaking to a successful issue. Death has come to him, indeed, but the 
workman is alive. 

The plot of Tolstoi's last novel, " Who is Right? " is as follows: Vladimir 
Ivanovitch Spessivtzer, who is employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, has 
been spending some time abroad with his wife, Maria Nikolaievna, and his 
sixteen-year-old daughter Vera. In the autumn they return to Russia, and on 
the way to St. Petersburg visit a brother-in-law, Anatol Dimitrivitch Lishchin. 
who is a district president in one of the governments which have greatly 
suffered from bad harvests. The first conversation among the relatives does 
not prove altogether agreeable. The liberalism of the sixties is touched on 
superficially. Lischin feels insulted at the self-conscious, incautious tone of 
Spessivtzer, and this meeting places their by no means friendly relations in 
a very glaring light. During this time a conversation is being carried on in 
the bedroom between the ladies, while in the nursery the eldest scion of the 
Lishchin family is enchanted with his cousin Vere, a girl full of life, with 
sparkling eyes and beautiful teeth. A neighbor, a prince, is expected for a 
shooting-party which has been arranged for the morrow. During dinner he 
appears, and every endeavor is made to be pleasant to him. The next morn- 
ing they set off on slippery roads for the shooting. On the way a conversa- 
tion springs up about the conditions under which the peasant population lives, 
about bad harvests, and the organization of relief. Vera, who is accustomed 
to having attention paid to her on all sides, feels bored, the conversation does 
not interest her. Only when she hears that it is intended to organize help 
for the suffering peasantry, and that she can take part in it, does she become 
lively again. She finally receives permission to remain three weeks with the 
Lishchins. At the end of three weeks, when her old nurse comes to take 
her, she will not return home. In consequence, there is a scene at home be- 
tween the parents, and the father tries to bring his influence to bear on his 
daughter, but in vain. It appears that Vera's feelings and views — her whole 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 43 

nature, in short — have undergone a radical change. She refuses to leave 
people among whom she has an opportunity to work for the good of her 
neighbor, and where she can prove herself to be a useful member of human 
society. Moreover, she repudiates the idea of returning to surroundings 
where she would be condemned to idle inaction and a mere vegetative 
existence. / 

Ethico=SocioIogical Writings. 

" What is Happiness? " (1882). 
" What Shall We Do Then? " (1884-5). 
" My Confessions " (1889). 
"What I Believe" (1892). 

"The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1893). 
"Politics and Religion" (1894). 
"Christianity and Patriotism" (1895). 
"Letters to a Pole" (1896). 
"War and Peace" (1896). 
"What is Art?" (1898). 
" Slavery of our Times" (1900). 
"My Reply to the Holy Synod" (1901). 
"The Czar and His Ministers" (1901). 

The pith of these foregoing works is found in the chapter called " Tol- 
stoi's Philosophy." 

LIFE OF LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi was born August 28 (new style September 9), 
1828, on the estate of Iasna/a Poliana, in the government of Tula. He is a de- 
scendant of an ancient stock, one of his ancestors in the sixth generation, 
Peter Andreevich Tolstoi, having obtained the title of count through dis- 
tinguished service under Peter the Great. Leo was the youngest male member 
of a family of four sons and one daughter. His mother, who belonged to 
the princely family of the Volkenskis, died a year and a half after his birth. 
At the age of nine, he also lost his father. 

Iasnaia Poliana is a simple and essentially unattractive country-place; 
but the close intimacy with nature in which Tolstoi's earliest boyhood was 
spent, the atmosphere of country life and near contact with the peasant popu- 
lace must have impressed themselves strongly on his boyish susceptibility and 
doubtless lent permanent color to his manner of viewing life in general. 

In the year 1837, the children of the Tolstoi family, left without parents, 
were entrusted to the care of two sisters of the father and a distant family 
relation. Tolstoi first learned to know the city on entering the school of 
Kazan in 1843. " The conditions then prevailing in the management of the 
school were not of a kind calculated to inspire the young boy with respect 
either for the science or the honesty of its administrators. He chose a course 



44 TOLSTOI: 

in Oriental languages, but the indecision and restlessness which mark his early 
career did not permit him to devote himself systematically to any single 
subject of study. He turned to history and law, and even dabbled in mathe- 
matics, failed signally in a number of his examinations, and at the end of 
three years returned to Iasnaia Poliana without having been graduated. 

The estate of Iasnaia Poliana was badly managed at the time, and young 
Tolstoi, already fired with ideas for the improvement of the condition of the 
peasantry, set about at once introducing reforms which he thought would 
prove conducive to the improvement of the serfs and the land. He wanted 
to build better houses and lighten the labor of his men by machinery. But 
. his first experiment was doomed to disappointment. He was hampered at 
every step by the ignorance, the obstinacy and the mistrust of the people. 
Instead of being welcomed as a friend, he was looked on with suspicion. 

Losing all patience, he left in the fall of 1847 for St. Petersburg and 
there attempted to complete the course in criminal law which he had begun 
at Kazan. But his good resolution melted away with the thawing of the ice 
and snow. He returned again to Iasnaia Poliana in the spring and soon after 
went to Moscow. Here he threw himself precipitately with all the ardor of a 
vigorous and passionate nature, into the pleasures which the high society 
of the ancient metropolis offered. He gambled, drank, dissipated, tasted deep 
of all the "enjoyments of vice," as he later called them. Years afterward, 
when he had promised never to touch a card again, he lost a sum which he 
had not the means to pay. From this difficulty he was extricated by the unex- 
pected receipt the next day of the honorarium for his " Cossacks," all of 
which went in payment of the loss, but he seems after this never to have 
played again. 

Weary of the ceaseless round of pleasures, Tolstoi at length determined 
to tear himself away from his old acquaintances and surroundings and tempta- 
tions. With his brother Nikolai, he went in 185 1 to the Caucasus. Here he 
was deeply impressed and delighted with the grand picturesqueness of the 
natural scenery, and with the unhampered vigorous life of the primitive 
native tribes. In order to be able to continue his stay in that region, he was 
persuaded to enter military service. At that time there existed a state of war 
between the Russians and the wild mountain tribes. He took part in the 
various expeditions and had a narrow escape from Tartar captivity. 

The peasants whom he had hitherto known only in their peaceful agri- 
cultural life, he now met as soldiers, and there gained that deep and close 
insight into the workings of the human soul under the most varied circum- 
stances that so strikingly manifests itself in all his works. While himself under 
fire, he made minute observations of the fighting people around him. It was 
during his sojourn in the Caucasus that he began the writing of his " Memo- 
ries : Childhood, Boyhood, Youth," followed by " A Morning in the Life of a 
Landed Proprietor," " The Invaders " and " The Cossacks." 

In 1853 he returned to Iasnaia Poliana, but immediately afterward, on the 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 45 

outbreak of the Crimean war, joined Prince Gorchakov's staff and passed 
through all the dangers and hardships of a severe campaign. He took part in 
the battle of Chernigof and in the siege of Sevastopol. A captain of artillery 
serving in the same battery with Tolstoi, gives the following sympathetic 
account of Tolstoi during the war : 

" With his descriptions and rapidly improvised verses, the Count inspired 
all and made us forget the severest hardships of war. He was, in the most 
thorough sense of the word, the soul of our battery. When he was among 
ns we scarcely noticed how the time passed; when he was away (which hap- 
pened very often, as he was fond of taking little excursions to Simferopol) we 
all hung our noses. At last he returned — like the prodigal son — somber, dis- 
appointed, thinned down, at odds with the whole world. Then he would 
take me aside and begin a general confession, how extravagantly he had played 
and how he had been drinking, where he had spent the days and even the 
nights, and so on. And he worried and mortified himself on account of his 
depravity, and suffered pangs of conscience as if he had committed the Lord 
knows what crimes. One couldn't help feeling really sorry for the fellow. 
Such a man was he. ! In a word, a peculiar being ! Honestly speaking, I 
could not quite understand him. At any rate, he was an excellent chum, an 
honest soul, and had a golden heart. Whoever came near to him had to like 
him and could never forget him." 

The immediate literary outcome of his experiences in the Crimean war 
are the three famous sketches, " Sevastopol in December, 1854, in May and in 
August, 1855," written at leisure intervals during the war. 

Tolstoi left the army in 1855, having greatly distinguished himself as an 
artillery officer in Sevastopol. The knowledge of men and things he had ac- 
quired in his war experiences, find their fullest expression in his later incom- 
parable composition, " War and Peace." He had encountered daily danger 
at Sevastopol, had undergone all the fatigues and extremes of a hard cam- 
paign, observed the common soldiers as well as the officers in all situations, 
in all moods, on the field of battle, as well as in the hospitals and in the camp. 
At the same time he took note of the conditions of life in the besieged town 
and of the attitude of its inhabitants. This familiarity with every aspect of 
war became a wonderful instrument in his hands in the writing of his 
masterpiece. 

When Tolstoi came to St. Petersburg, he found that his literary fame 
had preceded him. He entered into social connections with the greatest 
writers of the time. Then there lived in the capital some of the greatest 
talents which Russian literature has to boast of — Dostoevski, Turgenev, 
Goucharov, Grigorovich, Ostrovski. All these he now met, but was particu- 
larly favored by Turgenev, the greatest writer of Russia at the time, who 
easily recognized the genius of Tolstoi. The latter, however, was but ill 
at ease in the society of these great men. When in the army, he mingled 
freely with the soldiers, laughed and talked with them, and felt himself in 



46 TOLSTOI: 

harmony with the freedom and democracy of the life there prevailing. 
Here, on the other hand, he found a spirit of exclusiveness, an intellectual 
aloofness which displeased him, for his nature revolted against every form of 
aristocracy. Some of their conversations, too, displeased and astonished him. 
He could not understand how any one could grow honestly enthusiastic in the 
discussion of abstract and learned questions, such as the literature and the 
science of the day. These eccentricities, added to his intolerance of contra- 
diction, produced interminable frictions, and led to frequent quarrels, par- 
ticularly with Turgenev. It is little wonder, then, that he soon tired of this 
uncongenial intercourse with the intellectual fraternity of the capital, and 
again left for his estate. 

In 1857 he visited England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and 
Italy, and later traveled again in Germany. While in Germany he visited 
the schools, talked with some of the celebrated educators and examined the 
educational methods of the country, with the object of finding help for his 
contemplated scheme of popular education among the peasant children of his 
estate. 

Although disappointed in his search, he did not desist from his under- 
taking. He established a school in Iasnaia Poliana, conducting it on principles 
radically different from any system of pedagogy which had as yet been prac- 
tically tested. There was an utter absence of discipline, no strict limitations 
as to hours of attendance, no obligations as to attendance at all. Pupils were 
allowed to sit wherever they pleased, even on the window-sills, the only 
requirement in this respect being that the smaller ones should take the nearer 
places from where they could see their teacher. Often the teacher was seen in 
the center and all the scholars grouped around him. Tolstoi himself was one 
of the teachers. The institution prospered under his care, and in the course of 
two years there were twelve schools in the district. 

In the subjects and methods of education, the same freedom was observed 
as in external management. The object was not to force knowledge on un- 
willing minds, but to learn from the inclinations of the taught what knowledge 
was most congenial to them. In the opinion of Tolstoi, only such knowledge 
was of value. Hence, instruction should be made pleasant. With this view 
Tolstoi tried several experiments without success, until finally he won the 
peasant children over by telling them, in his own inimitable way, stories from 
the Old Testament. They hung upon every word, and usually cried for more 
when he had done. From the Old Testament he proceeded in the same man- 
ner to Russian history. By small courses in chemistry and physics he also 
introduced them to nature study. 

Tolstoi had the gratification of seeing his efforts crowned with success. 
The schoolrooms began to be visited also by adults. The children learned 
reading and writing, and some even displayed remarkable imaginative and 
creative talent. Special text-books were prepared for the schools, some of 
them composed by the pupils themselves. All who had visited the schools, 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 47 

among them some famous padagogists, unanimously conceded the remarkable 
success of his experiment. In the pedagogic magazine, which he published 
under the name of Iasnaia Poliana, Tolstoi explained the methods of his 
schools and their basic principles. The magazine contains some very valuable 
suggestions on national education. With these, however, he intermingles opin- 
ions on education in general, on progress and civilization, which are note- 
worthy as revealing his peculiar position on these subjects, even at that early 
period. Progress, in his opinion, was useful only to the leisured classes; for 
all others it was an evil. 

The sad fate of his brother Nikolai, who died in his arms at Nice in 
October, i860, after a long period of suffering from consumption, left a deep 
and lasting impression on Tolstoi. The picture of the going out of life which 
he had witnessed, remained with him for a long time and haunted him. The 
admirable death-scenes in his subsequent fiction were probably composed under 
the influence of this experience. 

During the Crimean war appeared the trilogy, "Sevastopol in December, 
1854; m May, and in August, 1855," followed immediately by "The Wood- 
Cutting Expedition" (1855). In 1856 he published "Notes of a Marker," 
" The Two Hussars," the " Snowstorm," and " An Old Acquaintance ; " in 
1857, " Lucerne " and " Albert ; " in 1859, " Three Deaths " and " Family 
Happiness;" in i860, " Polikushko ; " in 1861, " Kholstomier." 

In 1862, Tolstoi married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, the daughter of a 
physician in Moscow, of German descent, an early-developed girl of stately 
appearance, extraordinary beauty of figure and very tall. Her delicate face, 
encircled with thick chestnut-brown hair and animated with sparkling blue 
eyes, bespoke spirit and intelligence. She received a good harmonious educa- 
tion, being neither a one-sided training in accomplishments nor merely intel- 
lectual ; the imaginative faculties and the intellect were equally developed. 
She had a knowledge of four languages and read the masterpieces of the 
Russian, German, French and English literatures. This girl understood to 
the full the worth of a man like Tolstoi. She saw her highest dream of 
happiness accomplished when the much admired author declared his love to 
her. The circumstances of his declaration were precisely the same as those 
described in " Anna Karenina " between Levin and Kitty. Tolstoi and Sophia 
Behrs were sitting at a card-table apart from the other guests at a social gath- 
ering, when Levin took a piece of chalk and traced the following initial letters 
on the table-cloth : " W. y. a. m. t. i. c. n. b. d. y. m. t. o. n. ? " (" When you 
answered me then, ' it can not be,' did you mean then or never? ") She is said 
to have understood him immediately and answered in the same manner: 
" T. I. c. n. a. o." (" Then, I could not answer otherwise.") He was equally 
quick in deciphering her meaning, and thus they continued their conversation 
to the end. 

For the next several years Tolstoi gave himself up entirely to family life 
and to school work and the management of his estate. In 1865 he began the 



48 TOLSTOI: 

publication of his greatest novel, the prose epic, " War and Peace," in the 
Russian Messenger, completed in 1868. At the same time, he did not abandon 
his educational activity, publishing class-books, and inventing methods for 
the easier conveyance of rudimentary knowledge, and ingenious mnemonic 
devices, for children. In 1874 he began to issue his second great novel, " Anna 
Karenina," completed in 1878. Soon after he renounced his artistic career, 
and with but few exceptions devoted himself to the publication of religious and 
ethical books and pamphlets, and to work on his estate for and with the 
peasants. A pathetic incident connected with Tolstoi's abandonment of the 
literary art is Turgenev's dying appeal to his friend that he should return 
again to the calling which nature so plainly indicated as his own. When it is 
remembered what little appreciation Tolstoi showed of Turgenev, and how the 
latter had seen him fall asleep over the manuscript of his best novel, " Fathers 
and Sons," this circumstance assumes magnified importance, both as illus- 
trating the large-hearted disinterestedness of Turgenev and the extraordinary 
value he attached to Tolstoi's literary creations. 

" My dear, dear Leo Nikolaevich," wrote Turgenev, " I have not written 
you for so long, because I was and am still lying, to put it briefly, on my 
death-bed. I can not recover. But I write you to let you know how glad I 
am of being your contemporary, and able to place this, my last and sincere 
request, before you. My friend, return to your literary labors. Does not your 
talent come from the same source whence all things come? How happy I 
should be if I could know that my prayer had been granted ! My friend, 
great writer of the Russian soil, grant my prayer ! " 

In spite of this fervent plea Tolstoi but rarely returned to his old art. 
Besides his simple popular tales issued in 1880, he published " The Death of 
Ivan Ilich" (1885); the dramas, "The Power of Darkness" (1887), "The 
Fruits of Culture" and "The First Brewer;" " Kreutzer Sonata" (1888); 
"Master and Workman" (1895); "Resurrection" (1890) and "Who Is 
Right?" (1901). To his ethical, religious, and philosophical writings belong 
"My Confessions" (1889); "What I Believe" (1892); "What Is Happi- 
ness" (1882); "What Shall We Do Then?" (1884-5); "The Kingdom of 
God is Within You " (1893) ; " Politics and Religion " (1894) ; " Christianity 
and Patriotism" (1895); "Letters to a Pole" (1896); "War and Peace" 
(1896); "What is Art?" (1898); "The Slavery of Our Times" ^1900); 
" My Reply to the Holy Synod " (1901) ; and " The Czar and His Ministers " 
(1901). 

Tolstoi still continues active with the pen and ready to serve the poor and 
the oppressed with all the means at his command. In 1892, on hearing of the 
destitution of the peasants in the famine districts, he left all his literary labors, 
which at that time greatly absorbed his attention, and started a vigorous cam- 
paign of relief, going to the famine district himself, and enlisting in the same 
service, his two daughters and three sons. He established tea stands, soup 
booths, and corn and clothing stores. He was constantly on his feet from 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 49 

morning till night, in the severest cold, hail, rain or snow, going from house 
to house and gathering information about the needs of each family or indi- 
vidual. In addition, he found time to publish newspaper articles and pamphlets 
concerning the condition of the famine-stricken districts. 

It was to assist the emigration to Canada of the Dukhoborchi, a religious 
sect whose beliefs largely conform to the principles of Tolstoi, that he wrote 
the novel " Resurrection," the proceeds of which were to go entirely in their 
aid, and his manly letter protesting against the conduct of the government 
during the recent internal troubles, is still fresh in the memory of every news- 
paper reader. < 

From his youth, Tolstoi has been accustomed to vigorous, physical exer- 
cise. He was as much at home in the chase and on the ice-field as in the 
fashionable ball-room. Although now seventy-three years of age, he still per- 
forms manual labor and is a skilful cyclist. 

TOLSTOI, THE MAN. 

It is a truism to say that the works of art, even of genius, suffer in pro- 
portion as they are not self-intelligible and require biographic or other ex- 
ternal elucidation. It is this which obscures so much in the works of Goethe 
and narrows his popularity. Tolstoi is entirely free from such a fault, as are 
indeed all the best Russian authors, and yet it is a familiar fact that the wide- 
spread fame of Tolstoi, the author, is, to no small extent, due to the fame of the 
man. It was indeed a strange and unique spectacle which this count, the 
creator of " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," offered to the world. 
Hailed as the greatest author of Russia, gladly welcomed as a distinguished 
guest in all the circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow society, he suddenly 
turned his back on the splendors and pleasures which he had hitherto enjoyed 
and settled on his estate of Iasnaia Poliana to live and work as a peasant 
among the peasants. 

This change, which to the general onlooker must have appeared sudden 
and abrupt, was nevertheless but the practical expression of a stage of in- 
tellectual development which commenced with Tolstoi's youth and has never 
since this turning-point in his life quite cared to undergo modifications. 
Tolstoi early displayed a meditative and even brooding disposition. He 
was always skeptical of authority, and original in his views. At an age 
when the ordinary youth, scarcely in the exuberance of his own life 
so much as realizes the existence of death, Tolstoi's mind was mor- 
bidly exercised with reflections on this subject, and after witnessing the 
death of his brother, the thought of the ending of life seems never to have 
left him. It forms the theme of two of his shorter works, and is circum- 
stantially described in " Anna Karenina," and in other novels. Later, his 
speculations on death assume that mystic and metaphysical quality which is 
characteristic of so much of Tolstoi's constructive philosophy. Death is but 
" birth to a new life," and a life full of blissful promise, it would appear ; 



50 TOLSTOI: 

for in his latest pamphlet, "My Reply to the Holy Synod," Tolstoi writes: 
" Eternal life and retribution I recognize to such a degree, that at my age, 
standing as I do on the verge of the grave, I must often make efforts to refrain 
from desiring bodily death." This statement is not a little remarkable follow- 
ing immediately on the declaration of his disbelief in a life beyond the grave, 
and excluding, as he does in general, every element of the supernatural from 
the Christianity which he calls his religion. 

From these meditations on death, Tolstoi was naturally led on to the 
inquiry into the meaning of life itself. Since man's span is limited, how make 
.best use of what time there is? It was needful to work out a theory of life 
to solve this problem, and the result of his searching obtains its first direct ex- 
pression in "My Confessions" (1889), the appearance of which may be con- 
veniently taken to mark the formal severance between the old and the new 
Tolstoi. 

Tolstoi could never be completely reconciled to the life of pleasure to 
which he had for a time yielded. Even when most violently borne on the 
tide of his passions, and when he seemed completely and helplessly under their 
control, that second element in his dual nature, always strong in Tolstoi, the 
element which revealed to him the hollowness and emptiness of his existence — 
in a word, the spiritual element, was never entirely subdued. In " Notes of a 
Marker " he depicts the gradual downward progress of Nekhludov, who had 
become addicted to gambling, and who, in a moment of self-recognition, on 
realizing the abasement into which he had sunk, ends his life by sending a bullet 
through his head. This Nekhludov is an autobiographic character. It was 
not for years to come that he was able completely to extricate himself from 
the habits of overindulgence to which he had become a victim in conse- 
quence of the surroundings determined by his class position. 

With this new freedom, however, the solution as to the best mode of 
life became only the more urgent. He had already begun to be beset by 
doubts as to the usefulness of his work as an author. Even as he was writing 
his finest works, " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," he would some- 
times pause in the midst of his work and ask himself : " And why are you 
doing all this? And what, on the whole, is the meaning of your life? " Joy 
in mere creative work had ceased to satisfy him, had ceased to be a cause 
sufficient in itself. Fame and riches had lost their meaning. He was groping 
in the dark, and was in despair. The wherefore of life, and how to live it 
worthily — these questions came more and more frequently and more and more 
compellingly, until at last they would no longer leave him. 

Nevertheless, he was in possession of perfect health. " Physically," he 
writes in his " Confessions," " I could vie with the peasant at hay-making. 
Mentally, I could work eighteen hours without feeling any harmful conse- 
quences. And with all this, I had come to such a pass that I was unable to 
live, and that, in the fear of death, I had to resort to cunning against myself 
that I might not commit suicide." 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 51 

At that time Tolstoi happened to spend a winter in Moscow and under- 
took to study the problem of poverty as manifested in the conditions of the 
poor of that city. A census was about to be taken, and he procured the super- 
vision of the poor's quarter. With the aid of a number of students he went 
from house to house and had ample opportunity to make observations, and 
the indigence, the want and destitution he encountered surpassed all his ex- 
pectations. As usual in the case of Tolstoi, contact with the actual fact pro- 
duced a tremendous impression. Here, then, was something real to be done, 
the utility of which could not be doubted. The poverty of the city must be 
eradicated, and with an enthusiasm and a naive characteristic utopianism, 
Tolstoi set about the consummation of this object. He called together meet- 
ings of rich friends and organized a subscription fund. But the friends re- 
mained lukewarm and the subscribed sums were not forthcoming. Incredulous 
smiles greeted his pleadings. He was told that his efforts were futile, that it 
was his kind heart that prompted him to enter into such a work, but that poor 
people there always had been and always will be. 

At first he met these remarks with impatience and even with tears. Soon, 
however, he came to recognize his mistake. The cause of the misery of the 
masses lay far deeper than he had expected. It had its origin in the existent 
economic, and social order of things, and any such superficial measure as pro- 
posed by him, even if successful, could only serve as an inefficient and tem- 
porary relief. It required a thorough, radical reorganization of society to 
remove the cause of the evil. What enabled one group of people to live in 
riches and superabundance, brought about the misery and want of all the rest. 
Idleness in the one case meant overwork in the other. 

Tolstoi did not shrink from the inevitable conclusions of this recognition. 
He had long ago regarded himself as useless; he now found that he was a 
parasite. But did this parasitism at least bring happiness to those who lived by 
it? No. On the contrary, it engendered skepticism, disgust of life, despair and 
suicide. On the other hand, the peasant, who earned his bread by his own 
toil, did not weary of life. His joys were few, but he was able to live, while 
Tolstoi, the count, was not. Nor was the peasant tormented with questions as 
to the meaning of existence. Life and death were accepted as coming from 
God, and with the peasant this was no mere phrase. It was a reality. God 
pervaded their whole life, and death was but the last stage of life. 

In all their actions the consciousness of God is constantly present in the 
peasants' mind, and their simple duties proceed from God. Of these the first 
is love and helpfulness, the second work. To the peasant it is impossible to 
doubt the necessity of work. Hence, in order to attain to a recognition of 
God, the two main requisites are work and a spirit of helpfulness. Tolstoi, 
in adopting the life of the peasant, found in it not only the liberation from 
parasitism but the ultimate solution of the entire problem of life. In working 
for one's own needs and in being helpful to others, he discerned the justifica- 
tion of his existence. Such a life, if become universal, would, he thought, 



52 TOLSTOI: 

bring about the substitution of a world of good for the present order of force 
and oppression. 

Personal Appearance. 

The impression of his face is unique. A powerfully arching forehead 
with numerous wrinkles grouped in parallel lines around a middle deeper 
furrow. The eyebrows are thick and overhanging. In the sockets underneath 
are set two little, wise, sharp eyes, whose look seems to issue from the inmost 
depth and to penetrate into the very being of the person on whom it chances 
to rest. The nose is wide, almost flat, with thick nostrils. From these two 
heavy wrinkles run down in the direction of the mouth, whose underlip recalls 
the past life of sensual enjoyment of which he had so copiously tasted. While 
the hair on his head has gradually thinned, receding further and further from 
his forehead, but hiding part of his large and ugly ears, the mouth, cheeks 
and chin are covered completely with a long gray beard descending over the 
chest. No one will find this face harmonious or handsome in the usual sense ; 
it has even at first sight something frightening and uncanny. It is only on 
closer observation that one recognizes in his features the balanced equilibrium 
between intelligence and will, power and knowledge which lend immediate ex- 
pression to the personality. Usually the count appears in the country in a 
simple linen blouse held together by a narrow leather strap. Into this he 
thrusts one of his powerful hands, especially when looking at something, or 
engaged in leisure conversation. These hands show not only familiarity with 
the pen, but a capacity to grapple with whatever the practical demands of 
life enforce. For small clothes he wears trunk-host, and the feet are covered 
with a pair of those large, heavy, but well-made shoes, to the possession of 
which even the poor man of Russia attaches great value. The head is covered 
with a linen cap, like those worn by peasants. 

Method of Work. 

To this day Tolstoi exhibits a vast amount of interest with regard to all 
literary questions. As soon as he hears of some characteristic event he traces 
its causes and examines its possible availability for .a story. To become the 
subject of Tolstoi's elaboration, however, the theme must fulfil many qualifica- 
tions. In the first place, the subject must be new and intrinsically valuable. 
Secondly, it must touch a form of life with which Tolstoi is thoroughly famil- 
iar, for the count does not like to write from hearsay. Finally, and most 
important of all, the subject must take possession of Tolstoi, as a sick man is 
caught by a fever, or a man of sound health by a coughing-fit. Only then can 
Tolstoi turn to his work with a real artistic fervor. Almost all his works un- 
dergo numerous revisions. In the first place, a bare sketch of the work is pre- 
pared without any regard to detail. A clean copy of this is then made for Tol- 
stoi, and being placed on his desk, it is subjected by him to a re-elaboration. 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 



53 




SPECIMEN OF TOLSTOI'S MANUSCRIPT. 



54 TOLSTOI: 

But this, too, is still only a draft. Soon the manuscript teems with erasures, 
changes, insertions and references to the other side of the page. Then a 
second clean copy is prepared and undergoes the same process. The same fate 
is shared by the third. Some chapters are rewritten by Tolstoi in this manner 
more than ten times. At the same time, he gives but scant attention to 
stylistic improvements, and has indeed a contempt for everything polished, 
finished and elaborate in art. It serves only, he says, to stifle the thought 
and injures the effect. He labors under an intense strain on each single 
chapter, permitting himself but slight intervals of relaxation, during which 
he keeps patiently to his bed. But few chapters come, out successful, so to say, 
at the first throw, as for instance the race scene in " Anna Karenina," which 
he wrote under the influence of an account of Prince Obolenski. When finally 
the work has attained its desired form, Tolstoi would read it first to a circle of 
friends, whose remarks he would utilize. That the impression on the hearers 
does not always answer the expectations of the count, is best illustrated by 
the following incident: 

After completing " The Power of Darkness," Tolstoi read the drama to 
several peasants to try its effect. What was the consequence? At the most 
thrilling passages, which Tolstoi could not recite without tears, a number of 
his hearers suddenly broke out into loud laughter, and thereby cooled the au- 
thor's ardor considerably. The same thoroughgoing care which he bestows on 
his manuscripts, he also applies to the proof-sheets, and very often transforms 
these into new manuscripts. It may be asserted without exaggeration that 
after Tolstoi had examined ninety-nine proofs of his works, he would still 
find something to change in the hundredth. The feeling of self-criticism is in 
general highly developed in our author. It often happens that the very 
next day he regrets the mistake which he had made the day before. 

GENERAL SURVEY. 

" Tolstoi's writings and life have meant more to me than an}' other man's. 
It seems to me that his greatest word is peace ; and in this, as in everything, 
he appeals to the intellectual and spiritual reality within the official and social 
simulacrum which hides each of us from the others. 

" Tolstoi's literature, his matchless art, his fiction, which makes all other 
appear so feeble and false, is merely the flower of his love of men, his desire 
to be true to them. I can not separate his ethics from his esthetics, for he 
has himself known no difference in them. But it seems to me that in his 
fiction he works more instinctively and vitally, and I believe that in this he 
will work longest. As a teacher, he has put into contemporaneous terms the 
wisdom which has always been in the world for the conduct of men ; but as 
an artist, he has divined things concerning their nature and character in mys- 
tical heights and depths unreached before, and has portrayed life with an 
unexampled truth and fulness. 

" One perfect life and one unerring doctrine we had already, and it is 
praise enough for Tolstoi to say that he teaches these with all his heart and 
all his mind; and however he falters and wanders, he worships them by a 
constant endeavor for their goodness and beauty." — W. D. Howells. 

" To comprehend Tolstoi, the devotee is to remember that he is first of 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 



55 




SPECIMEN OF TOLSTOI'S PROOF CORRECTIONS. 



56 TOLSTOI: 

all the creative writer, the artist, the poet. His dramatic sense still affects his 
life. But every great author must be a humanitarian. As a Russian symbolist 
of the primitive Christianity, Tolstoi is in no wise a fanatic. There is a stern 
rational purpose in his bearing. He is a man on the ground, with arms out- 
spread — a living cross — in the pathway of armies and emperors. Tolstoi is 
the supreme exemplar of an ideal, that of the patient and unselfish labor that 
is both love and prayer. An ideal routs the force of conventions ; a single 
protagonist inspires a host of men. Tolstoi is the chief of living inspirers, 
and not for Russia alone. The children of his sotd spring up in other lands. 
In my belief the most sincere, the most modest, the most distinguished of our 
own living writers, he has never been so great as since he openly consecrated 
his humor, his imagination, his pathos to the service of humanity. If he is 
not yet fully comprehended, he is beloved- — already on our hearts' list for 
canonization. The rest will follow." — Edmund Clarence Stedman. 

" Looking on Tolstoi simply as a writer, and appreciating him as a 
reader, there is one book which stands preeminent as a masterpiece of fiction, 
' Anna Karenina.' It is certainly Shakespearian in its matchless portraiture, 
its wide range of human character ; and it appeals to us even more than 
Shakespeare's work. Now Tolstoi in his converted state disavows his novels 
and has taken up the idea that all art for art's sake is wrong; in his first years 
he was guilty of that crime of writing purely for art's sake."- — Zangwill. 

"' I desire to pay my tribute to the extraordinary quality of Tolstoi's 
works of fiction; and especially of those novels which, like ' Sevastopol,' and 
' War and Peace,' lay their scenes among the events of war. To anyone who 
has been in military service, these books differ in kind from all other novels 
bearing on the same theme. All other military pictures, before those of Tol- 
stoi, resembled those familiar engravings of the death of Nelson, in which 
that hero dies on the quarterdeck, in the midst of battle, surrounded by weep- 
ing officers, each one of whom has apparently just emerged from a bandbox, 
in exquisitely fitting garments, in time to strike an attitude and bid his admiral 
adieu. The waste, the uncertainty, the desultoriness of ordinary war, the dirt, 
its disease, its neglect, its absence of system and of method — all these things are 
familiar to those who have read of them in the wondrous pages of Tolstoi." — 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 

" Of all distinguished men that I have ever met, Tolstoi seems to me 
most in need of that enlargement of view and healthful modification of opin- 
ion which come from observing men, and comparing opinions in different 
lands and under different conditions. This need has been all the greater 
because in Russia there is no opportunity to discuss really important questions. 
Among the whole hundred and twenty millions of people there is no public 
body in which the discussion of large public questions is allowed ; the press 
affords no real opportunity for discussion ; indeed, it is more than doubtful 
whether such discussions would be allowed to any effective extent in cor- 
respondence or at one's own fireside. Like so many other men of genius in 
Russia, then — and Russia is fertile in such — he has had little opportunity to 
take part in any real discussion of leading topics, and the result is that his 
opinions have been developed without modification by any rational interchange 
of thought with other men. Under such circumstances, any man, no matter 
how noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and pets 
them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of his brain. He can 
see neither spot nor blemish in them, and he at last virtually believes himself 
infallible. This characteristic I found in several other Russians of marked 
ability. Each had developed his theories for himself until he had become 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 57 

infatuated with them, and despised everything differing from them. This 
is a main cause why sundry ghastly creeds, doctrines, and sects, religious, 
social, political, and philanthropic, have been developed in Russia." — Dr. 
Andrew D. White. 

" It is not necessary to read Tolstoi in the Russian in order to appreciate 
him. His Russian is so simple, at times so crude, he is so far beyond the 
coquetry of language, he is so human, so general, that an American can under- 
stand him as well as a Russian. What he wants is to give life, not an example 
of beautiful style." — The Critic. 

" The circumstances under which the character of Tolstoi has grown are 
such as qualify the man for his work. He is so natural in Russia and would 
be so unnatural and out of place out of Russia, that one must understand the 
history of the country as well as the man to understand the two. He is a 
man of culture. He is entirely antagonistic to the conditions in which he 
was born and bred, and yet he lives in Russia. He is out of sorts with himself 
because he is out of sorts with his surroundings, always in a state of unrest." — 
Abram Cahan. 

" Nobody could possibly meet Tolstoi without being struck favorably with 
the earnestness and sincerity of the man. It is written on his countenance. 
He is serious and sober in his talk and cleanly in his person. Tolstoi may 
think he has cut loose from his novels. It is a mistake. The Tolstoi of to-day 
is from one end of his novels to th other. In a close study of the man one 
can not escape from the fact that his art and his life are in a great measure 
parallel. You can not take one without the other. If it were not for the 
art of his life, the world would never have got the art of his books." — 
Ernest H. Crosby. 

Criticisms on Tolstoi's Philosophy and Ethics. 

" A genius of rare order. In the lines of his religious and social thought 
am I, as a minister, interested. In these lines I am thoroughly convinced that 
he moves in the right direction; and that the movement of such a mighty 
spirit along these lines is one of the great factors of our present generation. 
While I differ from him in many particulars of his religious and ethical 
teaching, I am profoundly impressed by the fact that almost alone, one might 
say, among the great intellectual forces of our generation, he takes Jesus 
Christ seriously. It has been reserved for this one man to recall to the con- 
science of the Christian church the forgotten fact that Jesus Christ knew what 
he was talking about and meant what he said — even in the words that offend 
our Gradgrind minds." — R. Heber Newton. 

" Tolstoi knows no better or higher law than the law of charity, fra- 
ternity, and forgiveness taught by Christ." — The Nation, 1898. 

Criticisms on " War and Peace." 

" A wonderful work, but its weakest side — and that is what the public 
especially enjoy — is its history and psychology. His history is sleight-of-hand, 
dazzling your eyes with trivial details; and his psychology is a capriciously 
uniform turmoil over one of the same set of themes ; everthing has a relation 
to life, description, the military part, etc., is excellent. A master equal to 
Tolstoi we do not possess." — Turguehief. 

" What a painter and what a psychologist ! The first two volumes are 
sublime, but the third falls off horribly. He repeats himself when he philoso- 
phizes. At the end you see the gentleman, the author and the Russian — while 



58 TOLSTOI: 

up to that time you had seen only nature and humanity. It is strong, very 
strong." — Flaubert. 

" We see neither classic villains, nor classic heroes, we see only human 
souls, subjected to temporary passions and conditions, but in the main guided 
by pure and noble aspirations." — Strazow. 

" Anna Karenina." 

" ' Anna Karenina ' does not please me, though there are truly beautiful 
passages in it — the races, the mowing, the hunt — but it all tastes sour, and 
smells of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, Junkerthum." — 
Turguenief. 

" ' Anna Karenina '—one of the most thrilling novels of our time, making 
light of all romantic literature and trying to find the elements of a purely 
Christian art." — The Nation, 1898. 

"Memories: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." 

" Tolstoi's characters are astonishingly real. We get to know them as 
intimately as persons that we have known in the flesh, sometimes more in- 
timately. But in spite of and along with this intimacy, English readers can 
not help feeling all the while that they are brought into contact with strange 
and unfamiliar natures, whose thoughts and impulses and actions are not as 
ours, and yet are irresistibly true to life. This sense of novelty and back- 
ground of strangeness is not without its charm, for the element of surprise is 
essential to recreation. 

" The personages engaged are, in the main, the same throughout — 
ihe father, the eider brother, and sister, remaining more or less prominent all 
along. In particular the picture of his nurse, Natalie Savichna, will go 
straight home to the hearts of all who have been fortunate enough to learn 
by personal experience of what absolute unselfishness and unfaltering devo- 
tion old servants are capable. Degraded, as a girl, from the rank of a house- 
maid to that of a farm -servant for wishing to marry a fellow-domestic, and 
restored on resigning her desire, we find her regarding the gift of enfranchise- 
ment as a sentence of exile, and devoting the remainder of her life to the 
service of her young mistress. Her simple, affectionate ways, endless industry, 
and homely, unfeigned grief for the death of Nicola's mother, are illustrated 
in the most touching way imaginable. The account of her own last days is 
profoundly touching. 

"Of his mother, the picture, though faint, is lifelike, and the references 
to her always marked by a rare affection and reverence. Another admirable 
sketch is his German tutor, a lonely old man, sensitive, easily appeased, with 
comical methods of self-assertion, and a disinterested affection not wholly 
exempt from the desire of obtaining material quid pro quo. His father, 
too, is painted in vivid relief, — chivalrous, susceptible, and emotional; an 
inveterate gambler; always needing an audience for the performance of a 
good action; enviable on account of the perfect skill he showed in hiding from 
others as well as from himself the unpleasant side of life; and so constantly 
at the mercy of his impulses that he never had time to acquire any princi- 
ples; being for the rest quite too well pleased with life to see the necessity of 
them. 

" Nicholas (Tolstoi himself) is very far from being an ideal character, 
but rather one strangely compounded of good and evil, of ignoble curiosity, 
and chivalrous impulses, sensitive and confident by turns. All these shifting 
traits are delightfully illustrated in the episode of his grandmother's birthday- 
party, where he loses his heart, child fashion, to the little Sonia. 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 59 

" The second and third divisions of the book are even more absorbingly 
interesting. They supply the most convincing proof of the proposition that 
freedom is never denied to genius in the treatment of difficult and delicate 
problems." — The Spectator, 1889. 

Crimean and Caucasian Stories. 

" Tolstoi does not see in war events of collective masses in which the 
individual disappears, some grand effects with the sound of trumpets and the 
waving of banners ; but however well he understands to bring into prominence 
the main points of an engagement he never forgets that it is the individual 
men who do the deeds and suffer the sufferings of war. These men he knows 
not only as soldiers or as material for war. he knows them in their home 
occupations as peasants and citizens, and the officers according to their social 
position in peace. It is perhaps the first case in which the prodigious action of 
war is painted altogether as a human experience. There is no dyeing in fine 
colors, no exaggeration, it is the actual experience which he relates. And among 
the large number of individuals that pass under his observation he by no means 
gives preference to the officers. From the boys who enter the army as ensigns 
and in whom intoxicating dreams and reality are still mingled confusedly to- 
gether, down to the gray old man on whom the fate of a family depends, from 
the harmless amusements at night on the watch down to murderous onslaughts 
— nothing is lacking. Nor is the environment forgotten — the city with its in- 
habitants. It is the life, the whole of life, composed of the aggregate mass 
of active men, in a state of war. With great astonishment the author remarks 
how the usual interests, conversations, class distinctions, etc., by no means 
cease, and scarcely step in the background before the irruption of the unusual. 
Glancing over the whole, we see a picture of limitless wealth of features, of 
telling honesty and convincing truth. Every chapter confirms the author's 
declaration, that truth alone was his hero. And this hero he loves as only a 
poet can love his heroes." — Loweiifeld. 

" The Cossacks." 

In this common everyday story Tolstoi has evolved a real human destiny. 
During his long journey to the Caucasus, Olenin is still filled with arbitrary 
fancies, like young men who have not yet been seized by the reality of life, 
and who live more in their imaginings than in the actuality of things. Suddenly 
he steps into the realm of reality, so powerful, so unlike anything he had 
known before. The everlasting snow-peaks heave in sight before him, and 
from his every thought ring out the words, ' But the mountains ! Ah ! the 
mountains ! ' And they form a world mightier than our soul, they suffer no 
life, no feeling within their kingdom that does not accord with them. But 
the most wonderful thing of all he is yet to learn. This large, living, within- 
itself-reposing world has also a soul, yes, a human soul. Nature here is also 
man. The Cossacks living here are, as it were, the conscience and soul of 
nature. Here are no arbitrary fancies, no disordered, confused jumble of 
passions and feelings peculiar to the young man of culture. All is well 
defined, all determined by the exact demands which nature imposes through 
the changes of seasons. Here is no questioning, no doubt, no indistinct, half- 
stolen emotion, not even with regard to women. All is simple fact and as 
naturally self-understood as nature itself." — Lozvenfeld. 

" Finest and most perfect product of Russian literature." — Turguenief. 

" A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor." 

" When we read the little story we ask ourselves whether the peasant 
has in any literature been characterized more completely and vividly than 



60 TOLSTOI: 

here by Tolstoi? Everything is told with such life and originality, and at 
the same time in such a simple, self-understood and unpretentious manner. 
Not a superfluous word and no forced compression disturb the reader. Every 
sentence is the exhaustive expression of that which should be said, and fra- 
grant with nature, warmth and reality." — E. Zabel. 

" Polikushka." 

" This novel is terrible, but not hideous, dramatic in the extreme, but 
without any trace of striving after effect, characteristically true down to the 
smallest details, and in spite of its brevity so rich in substance that the reader 
gains the impression of having read a large novel, for the fate of Polikushka 
is closely interwoven with the portraiture of the broad life of the peasants." — 
E. Zabel. 

" Resurrection." 

" ' Resurrection ' is not a novel in the accepted meaning of the word, in 
the sense in which ' Anna Karenina ' is a novel. It is a formless, realistic 
narration, used to convey a scathing denunciation of social, political and 
official conditions in Russia. Nothing escapes : The prison management, the 
judiciary, the jury system, the civil service, the army, the state church, and 
above all, the horrors of the convoys of convicts to Siberia. In all this Tolstoi 
traces the corruption and oppression of the system to the shortcomings of 
the individuals directing it. But for the individual, he says, the system could 
not exist : those who have power and abuse it are individually responsible, 
each and every one of them for the misery of the poor, whose indigence, 
ignorance and darkness are the substratum upon which the whole corrupt 
superstructure rests, ever pressing it down deeper into the slough. The title 
does not refer only to the two imaginary characters in the book — the well- 
born man and the low-born girl whom he starts on the broad path. . . . 
Tolstoi preaches resurrection for every servant of the Russian state — accord- 
ing' to his picture, a mob of corrupt, self-seeking, loose-living, hard-drinking, 
well-mannered ' men of the world,' and he holds every Russian of the better 
classes morally dead. Russia must be born again. The Sermon on the Mount 
is all the guidance humanity needs." — The Book Buyer. 

"What is Art?" 

" Tolstoi is more essentially a man of genius than any writer now living. 
He has carried the methods of the novel further into the soul of man than 
any novelist that ever lived; and he has at the same time rendered the com- 
mon details of life with a more absolute illusion of reality than anyone else. 
Since he has given up writing novels, he has written a study of the Christian 
religion which seems to me, from the strictly Christian point of view, to 
leave nothing more to be said; and he has followed out his own conclusions in 
life with the same logic as that with which he has carried them out in 
writing. He is unique in our time in having made every practical sacrifice 
to his own ideal. Everything he writes, therefore, we are bound to receve 
with that respect which is due alike to every man of genius and to every man 
of unflinching sincerity." — Arthur Symons in Saturday Review, 1898. 

" Tolstoi classifies all his own fictions under the head of bad art. Tol- 
stoi believes in art; and not only does he admit that humanity can not act on 
without it, but he believes art to be one of our most efficacious means for 
securing the highest ends. It is not the suppression of art that Tolstoi desires, 
but its reform. 



A CRITICAL STUDY. 61 

" This book is the result of profound reflection, it illustrates both the 
vigor of the author's mind and his power of keen satire, and that one feels in 
its every page a warm glow of religious emotion, dominated by the ideal of 
universal brotherhood. Less than all this would suffice to secure a wide 
celebrity throughout the lettered world for Tolstoi's ideas on art. What 
strikes us first is the flood of light which Tolstoi sheds on all that is factitious 
and violently artificial in the art of to-day, — of the theater, of books. Instead 
of exalting art above measure, or of relegating it to some exceptional sphere, 
he merely considers it as one form of human activity, having intimate rela- 
tions with all the rest. Art is a method of communication between men, a 
means of bringing them together. 

" To recall an emotion which we have ourselves experienced and then 
communicate it to others through the medium of gestures, lines, colors, 
sounds, or verbal characters, such is the proper object of art. Art is one form 
of human activity, and consists in the conscious and voluntary conveyance of 
one man's sentiments to another by means of external signs. Art is a device 
for unifying men through the experience of common feelings; and as such 
it is indispensable to the life of humanity; and its progress in the path of hap- 
piness. Art, in short, is language differing from verbal speech, in this respect, 
that speech transmits the thoughts of man; art, his emotions and sentiments. 
Tolstoi maintains that art ought never to be followed as a business or pro- 
fession. 

" The book has many grave defects." — Rene Dominic in Living Age, 1898. 

" The work is a model of lucidity, often brilliantly epigrammatic, although 
disfigured by exaggerations, by repetitions, by errors of fact, and by glaring 
omissions such as the name of Ruskin among esthetic writers, and Watts 
among painters." — Literature, 1898. 

" A book of great importance and value. A direct appeal to the con- 
science and intelligence of the cultivated classes, summoning them to consider 
whether for the larger part of that which they applaud as art is art at all in 
the true sense, and whether its effect on themselves and on the world at large 
is not injurious rather than beneficial." — Popular Science Monthly, 1898. 

" All the best elements of Tolstoi's nature appear in this book, which in 
style and interest, is to be compared with the best works of Ruskin." — 
Bibliotheca Sacra, 1898. 

" What Tolstoi objects to most strenuously is the assumption of writers 
on art that there is a close and vital connection between art and beauty, and 
that the object of art is to gratify the esthetic needs." — Victor Yarros in 
The Dial, 1898. 

" After reviewing briefly the principal existing theories and finding little 
comfort in them, he proceeds to define art as an activity by which one man 
hands on to others feelings he has lived through. It is primarily a medium 
for emotion, as language is a medium for thought. The task for art to 
accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor, 
now attained only by the best members of society, the customary feeling and 
the instinct of all men. And in order that art shall foster this union of all 
men, it must appeal to all men, and therefore essentially to the natural 
psychology of the peasant, who thus becomes our criterion. The literature, 
music and pictures which the peasant can not comprehend are not art; and 
even that art which merely unites sections of humanity while differentiating 
them from other sections is base and false — namely, patriotic art and music, 
and art that is worked into different religions, for these divide the human 
family against itself." — The Outlook (English), 1898. 



G2 TOLSTOI: A CRITICAL STUDY. 

" As to Tolstoi's art, we should not be so interested in his opinions if he 
had not the power of putting the human spirit into human language beyond 
the power of any man now writing." — R. W. Gilder. 

SUGGESTED SELECTIONS. 

" War and Peace." 

Invasion of Russia. 

At Borodino. 

Burning of Moscow. 

Retreat and Destruction of the French Army. 

Battle of Austerlitz. 

Death of Andrei Bolkonski. 

Battle of Schonegraben. 

11 Anna Karenina." 
Anna's Illness. 
Anna and Her Son. 
Anna Commits Suicide. 
The Steeple Chase. 

" Resurrection." 

Description of Easter Festival in the Country. 
Revising of the Judgment by the Senate. 

Transportation of the Prisoners from the Central Prison in Moscow to 
the Train. 

" Memories: Chilhood, Boyhood, Youth." 
Picture of the Nurse Natalie Savichna. 

" A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor." 
Nekhludov's Reflections in the Earlv Morning. 




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